The poetry community at Strathclyde is growing and covers a range of forms, genres and approaches. In recent years, we have hosted a range of poets including Samantha Walton, Daisy Lafarge, Hubert Matiuwaa, Michael Pederson and Jackie Kay. We teach critical and creative approaches to poetry throughout the undergraduate programme in English & Creative Writing and on the MLitt in Creative Writing.

Dr Maria Sledmere

Maria joined Strathclyde in April 2022 and lectures across English & Creative Writing. Her poetry specialisms are ecopoetry and Anthropocene poetics, Language poetry, the New York School, Romanticisms and linguistically innovative poetries of the twentieth and twenty-first century. She is also involved in small press publishing, digital/post-internet poetics and DIY print cultures.

Maria is director of SPAM Press CIC, a poetry press based in Glasgow with over fifty print publications from international authors and a number of online magazines and articles. She is also founding editor of Gilded Dirt, a digital zine focused on late capitalism, waste and popular culture. She has performed her work around the world, most recently in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco.

Through Project Somnolence – a portable lab for exploring practice-based approaches to sleep ecologies – Maria has recently produced new poetic work and creative engagement activities which put poetry at the forefront of thinking about health, environment and wellbeing.

Selected poetry/poetics publications:

• Midsummer Song (Hypercritique) (2024)
• Cinders (2024)
• An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (2023)
• Cocoa and Nothing – with Colin Herd (2023)
• Visions & Feed (2022)
• String Feeling (2022)
• The Luna Erratum (2021)
• the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene – co-edited with Rhian Williams (2020) 

Dr Sarah Bernstein

Sarah joined Strathclyde in 2021 as Lecturer in English & Creative Writing. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on literary experimentation, gender, care and the commons. She is particularly interested in the idea of literary 'difficulty': its forms, its uses, its affordances. In addition to her fiction publications, Sarah has published a collection of poetry, Now Comes the Lightning, which was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing, and she is co-editor, with Sarah Brazil, of Rise Up and Repeal: A Poetic Archive of the 8^th Amendment. Her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies in the UK and North America, most recently a collaboration with Hilary White in In Insomnia (Broken Sleep), edited by Sam Ladkin, and in Four Letter Word, edited by Nicky Melville.

Selected poetry/poetics publications:

• Rise Up and Repeal: A Poetic Archive of the 8th Amendment
• Now Comes the Lightning (2015)

Student Activity

• Strathclyde Poetry Society
• Poetry Society

The Strathclyde Review

@strathclyde_review on Instagram

About our Professor Emeritus, David Kinloch

 David Kinloch was born in Glasgow. He grew up there and was educated at Glasgow and Oxford Universities. For many years he researched and taught French literature and language at a variety of Universities including Oxford, Paris, Swansea and Salford before arriving at Strathclyde where he spent the rest of his academic career. Starting out as a Lecturer in French Studies he held a variety of titles before being appointed Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing in 2013. He published his first poems in Glasgow University Magazine as an undergraduate and was taught for a while by Edwin Morgan and Alasdair Gray. He has published widely on different aspects of Francophone literature including the history of ideas, the poetry of Mallarmé and French-Candian theatre. He has co-edited studies of Franco-Scottish relations (with Richard Price) and Douglas Dunn (with Robert Crawford), and Joseph Joubert (with Philippe Mangeot). He has also worked in the fields of Translation Studies and Scottish Studies and is an expert on the work of Edwin Morgan .

David published his first full collection of poetry, Paris-Forfar (Polygon), in 1994 and a further five collections with Carcanet Press. His pamphlet, Iggleheim’s Ark (Stewed Rhubarb, 2022) has just been published and his next book, Greengown: New and Selected Poems will be published by Carcanet in November, 2022. David has won a number of prizes for his poetry inluding a Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award (2004), an AHRC Fellowship (2012) and a Cholmondeley Award (2022) which recognises a distinguished contribution to UK poetry. David has performed his work internationally at a variety of festivals in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand. 

Aside from his own work, David has been an active participant in the UK’s cultural scene. In 1984 he co-founded and co-edited the poetry magazine Verse with Robert Crawford and Henry Hart. It lasted for ten years and published a wide variety of now internationally recognised names including Les Murray, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie and John Ashbery among others. In 2006, David set up a cultural exchange between Scotland and Switzerland and, in 2008, helped to set up the Scottish Writer’s Centre. In the same year, with financial assistance from the University fo Strathclyde, he also founded the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. Subsequent to Morgan’s death in 2010 this became the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and David is the current Chair of the Edwin Morgan Trust which administer’s a generous bequest from the late Makar designed to support the work of young Scottish poets. While Professor at Strathclyde, David initiated the current taught M.Litt in Creative Writing.

Selected List of Publications:

• The Thought and Art of Joseph Joubert (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992)
• Dustie-Fute (London, Vennel Press, 1992)
• Paris-Forfar (Edinburgh, Polygon, 1994)
• Un Tour d’Ecosse (Manchester, Carcanet, 2001)
• In My Father’s House (Manchester, Carcanet, 2005)
• Finger of a Frenchman (Manchester, Carcanet, 2012)
• Some Women (Happenstance Press, 2014)
• In Search of Dustie-Fute (Manchester, 2017)
• Iggelheim’s Ark (Edinburgh, Stewed Rhubarb, 2022)
• Greengown: New and Selected Poems (Manchester, Carcanet, 2022)