Jo Shapcott Professor Co-Investigator of The Faerie Queene Now jo.shapcott@rhul.ac.uk

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Career

Poet Jo Shapcott was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin and a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University. She is currently Visiting Professor of Poetry at the Department of English Literary and Linguistic Studies, University of Newcastle and Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts, London. She is Consulting Editor for Arc Publications.

Teaching

As well as teaching regularly on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle, she has given lectures, seminars, tutorials and led workshops for a wide variety of groups and in a wide variety of arts and education contexts, for example, Oxford Brookes University, Liverpool University (The Allott Lecture), the Arvon Foundation, the Big Issue Writers' Group, the Poetry Society of India and the South Bank Centre.

Research and Publications

Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (2000), consists of a selection of poetry from her three earlier collections: Electroplating the Baby (1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Phrase Book (1992), and My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). She has also won the National Poetry Competition twice. Together with Matthew Sweeney she edited an anthology of contemporary poetry in English, but gathered from around the world, entitled Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (1996). Tender Taxes, her collection of conversations with Rainer Maria Rilke's poems in French, was published in 2002.

Jo Shapcott has worked with a number of musicians on collaborative projects. She has written lyrics for, or had poems set to music by, composers such as Detlev Glamert, Nigel Osborne, Alec Roth, Erollyn Wallen, Peter Wiegold and John Woolrich. Her poems were set to music by composer Stephen Montague in The Creatures Indoors, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre in London in 1997. The world premiere of Gladestry Quatrains, a song cycle using her poem sequence of the same name and set by composer John McCabe, was performed at the Presteigne Festival, 2005. During the BBC Proms season from 2000-2003, she presented the weekly 'Poetry Proms' on Radio 3. She has also collaborated on a number of poetry projects with scientists, and is the editor of Discourses, a collection of new poems by leading poets in response to the work of contemporary scientists, published in 2002.

 

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