aboutME
I’m Jason Allen-Paisant, a scholar, award-winning poet, and writer. I explore the ways in which Afro-diasporic artists and communities shape their futures through embodied, living philosophies. My work is deeply concerned with poetry; its embodied, spatialized, sensed ontologies; and the overlaps between poetry and philosophy.
I am also a poet and writer. My poetry and essays have been published or anthologised in publications such as Granta, The Poetry Review, PN Review, More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry, and New Poetries VIII (Carcanet). My book Thinking with Trees was published by Carcanet Press in June 2021 and won the poetry category of the 20222 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Recent commissions for written work and embodied, multimedia performances have come from the Cincinnati Art Museum and LUX Moving Image (London)
I'm Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Critical Theory and Creative Writing in the Department of English, American Studies, and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, and an alumnus of the University of Oxford, the École normale supérieure (Ulm), and the University of the West Indies (Mona).
My scholarly work has also been published in Cultural Critique, French Studies, New Formations, and New Theatre Quarterly, among other venues, I've guest edited a special issue of parallax entitled Performing Black Futures, and my book Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. You can read more about my work as a scholar here.