Overview

I am Lecturer in Creative Writing (E&S) at Exeter.

I’m the author of the poetry collection Absence (Cheerio, February 2024) and the pamphlet Hotel (Verve, 2020). I received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018, and my poems and short stories have appeared in magazines including The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, Poetry London, Poetry Review, PN Review, and The London Magazine. I have been shortlisted or highly commended in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize, the Ginkgo Prize, the Rialto Nature and Place Prize, the Jane Martin Prize, the Pat Kavanagh Award, and the Poetry Book Fair competition.

I frequently collaborate with composers and settings of my work have been performed at Wigmore Hall, the Barbican, and the Southbank Centre, and featured on Radio Three and Radio France Musique. My songs include ‘Familiar Objects’, a sequence of poems with semi-improvised music from The Hermes Experiment (shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Award), and ‘Like Words’, the lead single of Héloïse Werner’s album Phrases (Times Classical Album of the Year).

I have an AHRC-funded PhD in Creative Writing from Durham, an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, and a first-class degree in Politics from Cambridge, where I received the John Dunn and Precious Pearl Prizes.

I have worked as Associate Editor of Poetry London, Editorial Manager for the Poetry School, and, most recently, as Programme Officer for the Poetry Society, where I organised the Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair.

My personal website is www.alilewispoet.com.

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Research

My PhD comprised a creative and a critical component. The creative component – a collection of poetry entitled Absence – was published by Cheerio in February 2024.  The critical component was an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of literature, the sociology of gender, and the sociology of work, entitled, ‘“When you told people... you were a poet, didn’t you get your head kicked in?”: Precarious Manhood in the Poetry of Don Paterson and Simon Armitage.’

My research interests include creative writing; gender; critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM), particularly the Precarious Manhood paradigm; contemporary poetry, and especially the 1994 New Generation Poets; the sociology of labour; and labour's relation to gender and poetry. I am also interested in publishing, ecopoetry, and collaborations between poets and musicians

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