& The Midnight Heart Blog
Zoë Brigley Thompson is the author of three books of poetry: Hand & Skull (2019), Conquest (2012), and The Secret (2007), all published by Bloodaxe. She also has a collection of nonfiction essays, Notes from a Swing State (Parthian 2019), and edited the academic volume Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives (with Sorcha Gunne).
"Brigley's sense of social justice is woven with delicacy and strength, in a voice that is neither daunted nor hectoring. She is attuned to the most subtle forms of both violence and hope, and so with often startlingly beautiful imagery can offer the reader new ways of gathering morale in disheartening times." -- Emily Trahair
Back in 2004, I started a blog called The Midnight Heart via Warwick Blogs, which the Times Higher Education Supplement listed as one to watch. This new site is a continuation of what I started there.
My 5-year-old son is refusing to like unicorns. “Unicorns are for girls,” he tells me. “The boys in school said so.” I bought him a unicorn T-shirt but lately he only wears it at home. I try to encourage him, but I also think back to my own childhood: how my wise, feminist mother would [...]
Edward Burne Jones: Proof of an illustration designed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott "Chaucer": p.441, 'The Legend of Goode Wimmen'; Philomene, with a woman (Philomela) standing by her loom holding a shuttle in an interior, with a half-woven tapestry with the story of Pholomene and Tereus, looking out of the window. 1896 I have been [...]
I am judging the Battered Moons poetry competition this summer. There is just a week to go until the deadline (June 30th, UK residents only) so here I answer the question, what do I look for in a poem? 1. I have eclectic taste. I do not exclude any school or movement from my reading: [...]
Recently, some scary things have been happening in Ohio in relation to anti-abortion legislation. At the same time as these debates began to take on a new urgency, Welsh writer Robert Minhinnick asked me to contribute to a project called "Letters from the Future," which sees a collective of writers creating imagined letters from a [...]
What kind of sex education did you have, if you had any at all? I’m always interested in hearing about people’s experiences of sex education in school, but whatever your experiences have been, I can bet that it was not as helpful as it could have been. Yeah, remember these from sex ed class? [...]
A feminist call might be a call to anger, to develop a sense of rage about collective wrongs.– Sara Ahmed Most women have had it happen to them. Walking back to the car one day after work, I am thinking about all the things I have to do, when a man stops me. “You should [...]
[Featured image by Christian Schloe, Lost in a Dream.] I am very excited this month to see the first episodes of my podcast going live, a project which I developed with Brendan Walsh. The title is Sinister Myth: How Stories We Tell Perpetuate Violence, and the logo was designed by the brilliant Breanne LeJeune. But [...]
Early on in the Sexuality Studies course I'm teaching, we read some extracts from Harvey Milk’s writings, especially where he was defending gay teachers from campaigns that sought to eliminate them from the classroom. Harvey Milk’s work is memorialized - his speeches have been recorded and published for example - but the work of other [...]
I felt very lucky to recently have an opportunity to be interviewed for a program on BBC Radio 4. It was a program created by writer Mab Jones, who had an idea inspired by a series of postcards she collected featuring women in traditional Welsh dress. She started to wonder about what the women would [...]
I have a new article out today in Wales Arts Review, which tries to capture the strange time before elections in America, when the midterm hype coincides with Halloween. Halloween was not really celebrated in the US until the 1920s, brought over by white immigrants, but it has become a national craze, and far more [...]
