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I am interested in contemporary poetics: poetry, prose, and their areas of overlap and intersection. I completed a poetry PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre in November 2022: the critical component is titled 'Strangely Alive': Elizabeth Bishop and the 'Art of Story Writing'. The thesis examines Elizabeth Bishop’s technique of overlapping the lyric with narrative in her autobiographical prose writing of childhood. The creative component is titled 'We Play Here'. The book was developed as part of a wider thesis exploring the imbrication of verse and narrative. We Play Here is a collection of four poem sequences set in Protestant working class North Belfast in the summer of 1988 against a background of political turbulence. Four female friends navigate an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect.