Sarah Jackson is one of the most outstanding new voices in contemporary poetry. She is already receiving wide recognition for work which is enriched by her accomplishments as a critical theorist and executed with a beguilingly skilful lightness of touch. Born in Berkshire in 1977, she completed her DPhil in Creative and Critical Writing at Sussex University with a thesis entitled The Textual Skin: Towards a Tactile Poetics.

Sarah doesn’t distinguish between her creative and academic writing, saying 'the notion of intimacy, its pleasures and its discomforts, runs through both my scholarly writing and my poetry'. Her work imparts the strange wisdom born out of a refusal to shy away from the discombobulating power of the body and the subconscious mind. But what is really remarkable about Jackson’s poetry is her ability to distil this subject matter into stark, surprising images and memorably honed phrases.

Jackson taught creative writing in a range of academic, community, and mental health settings before taking up the post of Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. She is poetry editor at The New Writer magazine and her poems have been published in journals such The Rialto, Envoi and Other Poetry and Magma, which selected her as a showcase poet in 2008. Jackson’s work features in Bloodaxe’s 2009 anthology Voice Recognition and she is currently completing her first full poetry manuscript.