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, and the overlaps between poetry and philosophy.
My first book of poemsThinking with Trees won the poetry category of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; it was also shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. My second, Self-Portrait as Othello, is a Poetry Book Society Choice and the winner of the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection; it is currently shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize. Recent commissions for written work and embodied, multimedia performances have come from the Manchester Art Gallery, 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 the West Indies (Mona), the École normale supérieure (Ulm), and the University of Oxford. At the University of Oxford, I earned a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy) in Medieval & Modern Languages, with a dissertation on theatre from the French- and English-speaking Caribbean.
My scholarly work has been published in numerous journals and magazines in the English- and French-speaking world. I am the author of Théâtre dialectique postcolonial (Classiques Garnier), and a second monograph, Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, will appear in February 2024 with Oxford University Press. My memoir, The Possibility of Tenderness, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2025.