Emily Critchley


Emily Critchley is an experimental writer and academic. Her writings have garnered numerous international awards, including the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry and the John Kinsella-Tracy Ryan Prize for Poetry, among others. Her work has been translated into several languages.

Early life

Critchley was born in Athens, Greece, and grew up in Dorset, England. Her mother is Greek. She states that her influences include T. S. Eliot, the Language poets, Gertrude Stein, and John Berryman, among others.

Education

Critchley gained her B.A. from the University of Oxford, her MA in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Bristol University, and completed a PhD entitled "'Doubts, Complications and Distractions': Rethinking the Role of Women in Language Poetry" at the University of Cambridge.

Career

Critchley specializes in contemporary experimental writing. In 2006, she organized a three-day international conference for contemporary experimental women's writing at the University of Cambridge and another in 2010 at the University of Greenwich. She is an editor of Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, the sequel to the poetry anthology Out of Everywhere published by Reality Street Press in 1996. She is a co-editor of #MeToo: A Poetry Collective.
Critchley has been anthologised and interviewed, and her work has been critically reviewed by Maryam Hessavi in Poetry London ; Peter Riley in The Fortnightly Review ; Isabel Galleymore in Prac Crit, 9 and Professor David and Christine Kennedy in Women's Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970 – 2010.
Critchley's writing has been compared to that of Denise Riley, Leslie Scalapino, and Mina Loy. She has been performing her work since 2000. In 2004, she won the John Kinsella-Tracy Ryan prize for poetry and in 2011, was joint winner of the national Jane Martin Prize for Poetry.
Critchley is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. She currently lives in London. She works as a librarian in Sandringham School in St Albans.

Critical writing

  • Afterword to Adelaide Ivánova's The Hammer and Other Poems
  • Introduction to
  • 'W.S. Graham and the Caught Habits of Language', talk, Newcastle Poetry Festival
  • Entries on Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jean Day, Vanessa Place, Jennifer Moxley and Alice Notley in The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, ed. Ian Hamilton and Jeremy Noel Tod
  • 'Denise Riley: "Writing our / Difficulties,"' Poetry Review
  • '"Moi aussi, Marianne," or Moving the Targets, being a crypto-ironic response, etc.' The Claudius App
  • Guest editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 3:2: a Greenwich Cross-Genre Festival edition
  • '"We live on buoyant fragments" : A further selection of American writers from the Greenwich Cross-Genre Festival,' Cambridge Literary Review, ed. Boris Jardine and Lydia White, 1:5
  • 'A selection of North American women writers from the Greenwich Cross-Genre Festival, and some thoughts about their work', Cambridge Literary Review, ed. Boris Jardine and Lydia White, 1:4 ; pp. 9–43
  • 'Lyn Hejinian's Faustienne Beings-With', Stress Fractures, ed., Tom Chivers, pp. 55–72
  • 'Leslie Scalapino's "alternative ways of seeing"', Delirious Hem, eds, Cara Benson, Elizabeth Bryant, Catherine Wagner lesliescalapinotribute.wikispaces.com/file/view/Emily+Critchley7.pdf
  • Review of Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, HOW2 Journal, 3: 3
  • '"oubts, Complications and Distractions": Rethinking the Role of Women in Language Poetry', Hot Gun! ed., Josh Stanley, 1:1, pp. 29–49
  • 'Post-Marginal Positions: Women and the UK Experimental/Avant-Garde Poetry Community', ed. Cathy Wagner, Jacket magazine, 1:34
  • 'Dilemmatic boundaries: constructing a poetics of thinking', Intercapillary Space, ed, Edmund Hardy, 1:4 www.lulu.com/items/volume_34/533000/533882/2/print/533882.pdf
  • A conference overview + introduction to the Cambridge Contemporary Experimental Women's Poetry Festival, How2 journal, vol. 3:1

Published works

  • When I say I Believe Women…
  • Of All the Surprises
  • Who handles one over the Backlash
  • Hopeful For Love Are Th' Impoverish'd Of Faith
  • Love / All That / & OK: Selected Writing
  • Sonnets for Luke
  • IMAGINARYLOVEPOEMS
  • This is not a True Thing
  • Salutation to Poetry with John Hall
  • Some Curious Thing
  • Ten Thousand Things
  • These. Insuing. Sonnets. with Eric Langley
  • Arrangements
  • Alphabet Poem: For Kids! with Michael Kindellan and Alison Honey-Woods
  • ''Home''

Awards and accolades