& 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.
If you think about it, it is pretty bizarre. I'm talking about the strange pressure that comes with living in a human body. A few years ago I was teaching a course that I don't normally teach. It's a kind of introductory writing seminar for first year students, and I chose the topic of the [...]
I am really looking forward to my podcast, Sinister Myth, starting up again at the end of the month, featuring an interview with Cowlitz non-fiction writer, Elissa Washuta. I know a lot of my podcasting friends have been working out how to deal with the current crisis where we don't have the same access to [...]
Photo by World Resources Institute This post is packed with all the stuff I have been writing, reading, and learning about poetry and eco justice. Thinking about urgent issues like mass extinction, it has become clear to me in the last few years that social and ecological issues are inextricably linked. For example, dodgy building [...]
The submissions window for ‘Dwelling’ is open from 1st June – 31st July 2020. We welcome poems that have not been previously published, either in print or online. Up to 4 poems may be sent via Submittable, or by post if you live in the UK. Postal submissions are not acknowledged until a decision is made. [...]
Today is the day that my poetry film 'Un/dressing Poems' is released into the wild! The poems were originally published in the magazine Copper Nickel out of University of Colorado, Denver, and I am really grateful to the editor Wayne Miller. They also appear in my new collection Hand & Skull, where they work to [...]
The Battered Moons Prize-giving at the Big Poetry Weekend Imagine if we were suddenly given the supernatural ability to hear people’s thoughts. It’s a source of longing and desire - that feeling of almost wanting to climb into each other’s skins, to be so close to another human being that we could hear what they [...]
I might be trying to distract myself from hard Brexit developments (!!!), but I just wrote up this playlist to go along with my new nonfiction book: Notes From A Swing State. I am a popular culture junkie, and songs come up quite a bit in the book, all having some personal or political meaning [...]
My 5-year-old son has decided he doesn't like unicorns anymore. “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 [...]
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: [...]
