My work spans both scholarly research and creative writing, reflecting my deep engagement with embodied experience in the context of Afro-diasporic history. My critically acclaimed collection, Thinking with Trees __was a 2021 Irish Times Poetry Book of the Year and won the Poetry category of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Self-Portrait as Othello, my sophomore book of poems, won the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023 — the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize; it’s one of the rare books to have accomplished this feat. I have been the recipient of a prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for my research on poetry and theatre. I hold a Doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and am currently Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. My creative non-fiction book titled The Possibility of Tenderness will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2024. My work is represented by Harriet Moore at Aitken Alexander Associates.
Carcanet Press, 2021
Carcanet Press, 2023
Nonfiction. Forthcoming with Hutchinson Heinemann
Allen-Paisant J. 2021. Reclaiming Time: On Blackness and Landscape. PN Review. 47(3), pp. 31-34)
Kinship and cultivation: On the intersection of land, temporality, and ecological justice. Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH). April, 2023.
(De)Colonial Ecology – On the Possibilities of ‘Thinking With’. ’99 Fragen’, Humboldt Forum, Berlin. 21 March, 2022.