Dr Joanne Clement

I am an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, specialising in poetry. I am the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award for poetry (New Writing North) and an AHRC Northern Bridge-funded schloarship for a creative practice-led PhD. In my roles as the Managing Editor of independent literary magazine Butcher’s Dog and a Collections Selector for The Poetry Book Society’s book club, I contribute to literary discourse and help shape contemporary poetry culture.

My research lives in the intersections of race, class, climate emergency, and the cultures of care. I move between archives, peoples and places to interrogate and imaginatively explore the ways absence and presence can manifest in language.

‘Listen’, my lyric adaptation of Lidija Krylova’s Holocaust survival testimony has been translated into German and is now one of nine animated pieces permanently installed at the open-air exhibition that accompanies the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism in Berlin’s Tiergarten. I have a strong collaborative relationship with the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture and am a co-signatory founder of a forthcoming transnational Romani PEN International Centre in Berlin.

As an early-career Gypsy, Roma and Traveller scholar in the emerging field of Romani Literature – a branch of postcolonial literature – I offer in-depth knowledge across literary periods and critical contexts. Outlandish (Bloodaxe, 2022), my debut poetry collection, takes ekphrastic and textual starting points to confront Romantic impressions of Gypsy ethnicity, inviting readers to consider notions of otherness, trespass and craft. Shortlisted for the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre’s John Pollard International Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for a distinctive first book, it was a Poetry Society Book of the Year. Reviews and poems featured in Living North, Poetry Review, The Financial Times, The School Librarian, The Scotsman (Poem of the Week), and Times Literary Supplement.