Dr Maria Sledmere

Senior Lecturer

Creative Writing

Contact

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Personal statement

I joined Strathclyde in 2022 as a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry). My research and practice are wide-ranging, interdisciplinary and collaborative, exploring themes of ecology, technology and the everyday in literature. I have also taught English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, focusing on: poetry and poetics; nature and ecology; class, queerness and race in contemporary experimental writing; editing and publishing. Outside of academia, through organisations including Beyond Form Creative Writing, Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities and Glasgow Goes Green Festival, I have taught regular workshops and led courses on areas such as dream ecologies, the everyday, refusal and failure, experimental journaling, entanglement, poetry and pop music, trash poetics, weather and postcapitalist desire. I am also a poet, artist, essayist, music journalist and editor, working between lyric, long-form and traditional forms such as sonnets, sestinas and ‘the commonplace book’. My work as a writer, critic and collaborator has been highlighted in places such as It’s Nice That, Scottish Contemporary Artists Network, BBC Radio 3, The White Review, Dazed, The Skinny and The Poetry Project. My poem ‘Ariosos for Lavish Matter’ was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prize and a piece of creative-critical response to the work of Etel Adnan, Tangents, was long-listed for the Ivan Juritz Visual Arts Prize. My pamphlet, Polychromatics (Legitimate Snack, 2021), was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Calum Macdonald Award.

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Teaching

I teach English and Creative Writing at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

I would be open to PhD proposals in English on the following topics:

  • Twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry and poetics
  • Ecopoetics and ecocriticism 
  • Literature, energy and infrastructure 
  • Small press poetries and publishing
  • Post-internet art and poetry 
  • Literary theory 
  • Modernity and the everyday 

I would be open to Creative Writing PhD proposals on the following topics:

I am particularly interested in poetry and nonfiction which explores themes of ecology, environment, energy, infrastructure, ekphrasis, pop culture, sleep and dreams. I would also welcome proposals in any genre which take a post-internet approach in form and content. I look for PhD projects which are bold, experimental, critically-informed and often taking a hybrid approach to genre and craft.  

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Research Interests

My academic interests hinge on the question: how do literature and culture respond to, and intervene in, critical issues of climate breakdown, energy transition and technological change? I am passionate about collaborative, practise-led and interdisciplinary approaches to this question. My research is currently centred on the role of sleep and dreaming in literature, culture and daily life. With the sound artist Dr Kevin Leomo, I am one half of Project Somnolence: a portable lab for exploring the different ways people experience sleep, sleep disturbance and dreams. Funded by the University of Strathclyde and the Dear Green Bothy, Project Somnolence engages practice-based methods including poetry, music, performance scoring and participatory workshops in conversation with perspectives from psychology, philosophy and the environmental humanities. I was also recently lead on Brilliant Vibrating Interface: Queering the Post-Internet through Poetry and Practice - a year-long series of workshops - a year-long series of workshops, podcasts and editorial features leading up to a book-length publication and digital exhibition (funded by the Edwin Morgan Trust's The Second Life Award).

I am the author of over twenty creative print publications including chapbooks, exhibition books, collections and anthologies. My most recent poetry collection, Cinders, was published by the Bay Area press Krupskaya. Other works include The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021), String Feeling (Erotoplasty, 2022), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022), Cocoa and Nothing - with Colin Herd (SPAM Press, 2023) and An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023). With Rhian Williams, I co-edited an anthology, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020), and with Aaron Kent edited The Last Song: Words for Frightened Rabbit (Broken Sleep, 2023). A collection written with Ian Macartney, Languishing, cute, is forthcoming with Tapsalteerie in 2025, and a novella, The Indigo Hours, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books, also in 2025. My work has been widely anthologised and I have fulfilled creative commissions from musicians such as Lanark Artefax, North Sea Dialect and Zoee, and organisations such as the Alasdair Gray Archive and ArtWalkPorty. An exhibition with Jack O’Flynn and Katie O’Grady, The Palace of Humming Trees, was shown at French Street Studios (now Strangefield), Glasgow in 2021.  

I have published critical work on areas such as post-internet poetry, solarity, twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, literary representations of meadows, commoning and atmospheric imaginaries in anthropocene lyric. My doctoral work addressed the contested term ‘anthropocene’ by developing a practice of ‘hypercritique’: a performance of im/possibility, attunement and hold within conditions of mass extinction, Covid-19 and climate breakdown. The book version of this, Midsummer Song (Hypercritique) is forthcoming with NoUP Press in autumn 2024.

Community engagement is important to my work. I have run practise-led workshops and public events for organisations such as Beyond Form Creative Writing, Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities, The 87 Press, Glasgow Goes Green Festival, Glasgow Science Festival, Glasgow Zine Festival, StAnza Festival, the Alasdair Gray Archive, Dear Green Bothy, Agile City and Book Week Scotland. These workshops focus on areas such as dream ecologies, sleep, the everyday, refusal and failure, experimental journaling, entanglement, poetry and pop music, trash poetics, weather and postcapitalist desire. My work as a writer, critic and collaborator has been highlighted in places such as It’s Nice That, The Guardian, Saltire Society, Scottish Contemporary Artists Network, BBC Radio 3, The White Review, Tank, Dazed, The Skinny and The Poetry Project. I have been commended in various literary prizes: most recently my debut collection The Luna Erratum was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Scottish Poetry Book of the Year (2022) and its follow-up, Visions & Feed, was shortlisted for ASLE-uki’s Creative Writing Prize (2023).

Professional Activities

Insights on Sleep and Rest
Organiser
22/5/2025
Reading at EMBASSY Gallery
Speaker
15/5/2025
Attuning to Slow Time: Sonic Art, Poetics and Performing Somnolence
Speaker
1/5/2025
Poetry pamphlet launch with Tom Bailey and Maria Sledmere
Speaker
10/4/2025
Reading: Language Garden
Speaker
29/3/2025
Strathclyde Recruitment Stall at AWP Bookfair
Recipient
26/3/2025

More professional activities

Projects

Suicide prevention in later life
Hafford-Letchfield, Trish (Co-investigator) Karastoyanova-Gibson, Konstantina (Co-investigator) Rasmussen, Susan (Co-investigator) Sledmere, Maria (Co-investigator)
01-Jan-2023 - 31-Jan-2028
Brilliant Vibrating Interface: Queering the Post-Internet through Poetry and Practice
Sledmere, Maria (Principal Investigator) Dunlop, Kirsty (Co-investigator) Hill-Woods, Alice (Co-investigator) Jung, Loll (Co-investigator)
Taking our cue from Edwin Morgan’s assertion that ‘Poetry is a brilliant vibrating interface between the human and the non-human’, this project traces the liquid pixels, folds and veils of various kinds of interface: from language to the ever-present digital screens of our lives. Uniting several concerns of Morgan’s own writing – queerness, experiment, hybridity and technology – Brilliant Vibrating Interface offers a dynamic and multiplatform series of creative outputs and community events based online and in Glasgow. We will investigate, publish and spark conversation around queer literary experiments in the digital age; in turn, expanding the canon to highlight the work of younger, emergent writers. With emphasis on works which engage explicitly, in form and content, with the internet, we will host a series of podcasts, interviews and workshops, leading up to a book-length anthology publication and digital exhibition.

Brilliant Vibrating Interface highlights the continual influence and relevance of Morgan’s work as a proto-internet poet (who wrote code, computational and concrete poems informed by machines) by placing his legacy in direct conversation with digitally native (‘post-internet’) writers and artists – from Morgan’s instamatics to the Instagram poetry of today. At the heart of this project, we share Morgan’s passion for poetry in dialogue with the visual, with technology, everyday life, sexuality and gender. Expect workshops on glitch poetry, interfaces, the queer poetics of trash, multimedia, collage and procedural forms. Our research and interview phase will explore the media, process and tools behind post-internet poetry as well as its cultural contexts, offering insights into how and why poets are engaging with various technologies in their work. Together we’ll dream more abundant, queer and playful digital worlds through poetry. Envision the virtual world of Second Life colliding with Morgan’s 1968 collection The Second Life: that’s our vibe!
01-Jan-2022 - 30-Jan-2023

More projects

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Contact

Dr Maria Sledmere
Senior Lecturer
Creative Writing

Email: maria.sledmere@strath.ac.uk
Tel: Unlisted