Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newman University, Birmingham, UK, and is a poet, critic, and curator with a focus on innovative writing. Her monograph A Social Biography of Contemporary Innovative Poetry Communities: the Gift, the Wager and Poethics (New York: Palgrave, 2017) explores a number of Trans-Atlantic poetry scenes from an ethnographical perspective, looking at the kind of exchanges involved in poetry, performance, and environmental writing and exhibitions. Further criticism has appeared in journals such as The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Jacket, How2, Green Humanities, and includes her editing of two special issues of the journal How2. She is a core reviewer for the US journal The Constant Critic and has curated international writing exhibitions with the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW).

Her poetry includes oh-zones (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2012); Exotic Birds (wordland, London, 2010; audio published by Reality Street, 2015); THIS IS MY ECONOMY: slam poems for quiet people (wordland, London, 2010); and Her Body: The City (Bad Press, Cambridge, 2009). Swims (Penned in the Margins) and Rivering (Oystercatcher) are forthcoming in 2017. She is currently working on the nature writing book/memoir A Dictionary of the Soil, which won Penguin/Random House’s 2016 WriteNow competition. Her poetry and performance has also featured in a film by artist Brian Shields, M, on the poet John Clare. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, including in: Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe, 2013), (the UK’s “most talented and interesting young poets”); Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK (Reality Street, 2015); and, most recently, The Woodland Trust’s The Tree Line: poems for Trees, Woods & People (Worple, 2017). She regularly performs her work national and internationally and on the radio. She has read her work on BBC Radio 3 and 4, including two of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programmes in 2017; A Dictionary of the Soil on “Soil Stories” and Swims on “Queer Icons.”

She has received a number of awards, most recently winning the Penguin/Random House Write Now award (2016), being nominated for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship (2017), winner of the Poetry of Migration Competition, Migration Museum (2016), and being longlisted for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers (2016). She was also shortlisted for the AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers programme in 2016/17.