Welcome

Dr Wanda O’Connor is a writer, artist, and lecturer based in Wales.

She is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer who works with libretto, film and performance, and writes in the genres of poetry, screenwriting, and short fiction.

Dr O’Connor is a member of the Critical Poetics Research Group and the National Association for Writers in Education. She has a doctorate in Creative and Critical Writing – which examined contemporary poetry and poetics, from Cardiff University, where she organised both Derrida and contemporary women’s poetry reading groups and taught Creative Writing and English Literature. Her poetry is based in a contemporary projective (open form) practice and her critical writing explores language writing, projective writing, women’s poetry, poetry and feminism, spatiality, and Heideggerean thrownness (Geworfenheit). A former classicist, she is interested in the intersections between critical theory, translation, philosophy and poetics and explores these relationships both in her academic and creative work. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, an Associate Lecturer at The Open University, and occasionally teaches for the Poetry School.

Selected writing is available from Marsh Hawk Review, Boiler House Press, Poetry Wales, Sidekick Books, Asymptote, Datableed, Magma, Molly Bloom, EPIZOOTICS!, Zarf, and The Best Canadian Poetry anthology. Her pamphlet damascene road passaggio is available to order through Above/Ground Press.

She helped to initiate and co-organise the Cardiff Poetry Experiment reading series sponsored by Cardiff University from 2014-2018, and hosted the Projectivisms Symposium there in 2018. She participates in collaborative projects such as Ghost Jam and Enemies Gelynion, and creates poetry films and writes libretto for opera.

Claim to fame: Queen of Rhodia (BBC Class).

NEWS

  • Review: Jerome Rothenberg’s “15 antiphonals for HAROLDO”

    Jerome Rothenberg’s “15 antiphonals for HAROLDO” (Sine Wave Peak, 2015) is a poem sequence of alternations that originate from the author’s response to photo-portraits of Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. In the concise collection, Rothenberg contributes phrases which mirror fragments he imports from the poetry of de Campos (italicized to differentiate). Economy is privileged: the…

Header image credit Aedrian. Gallery images by Jake Weirick, Annie Spratt, Miguel Bruna.