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Department of English and Related Literature
HomeDepartment of English and Related LiteratureAbout usEvents2026Creative Critical Feminist Forms

Creative Critical Feminist Forms: A Poetry Workshop with Karen McCarthy Woolf

Workshop

Event date
Wednesday 6 May 2026, 3.45pm to 5.15pm
Location
ATB/057, Alcuin East Wing, Campus West, University of York (Map)
Admission
Free admission, booking required

Book tickets

Event details

In this workshop with illustrious author and editor Karen McCarthy Woolf, you will develop your own practice and deepen your understanding of creative-critical writing, with a particular focus on intersectional ecofeminist approaches such as thinking with mycelial networks. 

McCarthy Woolf is a leading voice in poetry today, alive to the environmental challenges and grounded in intersectional feminism, as evidenced throughout her poetry collections and anthologies, and most recently in her libretto for Divine Feminine, which premiered in March 2026 at St Martin-in-the-Fields ahead of its national broadcast on Saturday 7 March on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds.

Following the workshop, at 6pm, there will be a series of readings to celebrate the launch of the Nature Matters anthology, edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf and Mona Arshi.

This event is supported by the Centre for Modern Studies and is part of the Creative Critical Feminist Forms research strand.

Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf, FRSL, is the author of three poetry collections and editor of seven literary anthologies, the latest of which is Nature Matters (with Mona Arshi, Faber, 2025). Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and her début, An Aviary of Small Birds was an Observer Book of the Year. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, where she wrote her latest collection, Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2026): a ‘taut’ and ‘hypnotic’ (Guardian) poetic meditation on the sacred, the city and our access to nature. In 2025 she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England).

Venue details

Wheelchair accessible