Denise Riley papers (Ms.2017.022)

Biographical / Historical

Denise Riley was born in Carlisle, England, in 1948. Educated at Cambridge and Oxford, she is known for her ability to meld philosophy, feminism, lyric, and literary history in books of poetry and prose. She is the author of the poetry collections Marxism for Infants (1977); the volume No Fee (1979), with Wendy Mulford; Dry Air (1985); Stair Spirit (1992); Mop Georgette (1993); Selected Poems (2000); and Say Something Back (2016), which was nominated for a Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection. Riley's nonfiction prose includes works such as War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983); 'Am I That Name?': Feminism and the Category of Women in History (1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005). Her chapbook, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), is a meditation on time after the sudden death of a child. Linking poetry and prose, a sequence of 20 short poems from the chapbook, titled "A Part Song," was published in the London Review of Books and won a Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem. Her most recent book is Say Something Back (Picador, 2016).

Riley has been A. D. White professor-at-large at Cornell University and writer-in-residence at the Tate Gallery and has held fellowships at Brown University and at Birkbeck, University of London. She was, until recently, Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia.

She lives in London.

[Bio note from the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/denise-riley]