Professor of Creative Writing, York St John University
Abi is Professor of Creative Writing at York St John University. She has won an Eric Gregory Award and Somerset Maugham Award for her poetry collections, The Glass Delusion (Salt, 2013) and Unexpected Weather (Salt, 2009). Abi has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing, she joined York St John in 2010 and was Subject Director for Creative Writing until 2017, and is now co-ordinating the MA and MFA programmes.
Her work often engages with other disciplines, such as visual art, science and history: she has worked with the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum and had poetry set to music by composers. Her writing explores such topics as mushrooms in Freud; the power of the squid in literature; the relationship between poetry and ventriloquism; climate change; ‘speculative elegy’, and pollination.
Abi's most recent work is a speculative fiction novel, The Headland, is published by Gold SF (Goldsmiths/Penguin)
Leonardo da Vinci’s incredible studies of human anatomy still don’t get the recognition they deserve
South African telescope discovers a giant galaxy that’s 32 times bigger than Earth’s