Amanda Holiday

Poetry, Race and Art

Currently researching 'pictured blackness' in poetry and art. 

The two-pronged interdisciplinary approach proposes expansive ways of comprehending pictured blackness and also offers an embodied and immersive way of understanding ekphrasis, black and even decolonial ekphrases and opens up important interdisciplinary dialogue in this area.

Artist, poet and filmmaker Amanda Holiday completed a degree in Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art in 1987. She exhibited with and was active in the 2^nd wave of the black British art movement before moving into film & scriptwriting - directing short experimental films for the Arts Council, BFI and Channel 4 before studying briefly at the NFTS. Between 2001-10, she lived in Cape Town where she wrote and directed several educational television series.

Her chapbook 'The Art Poems' was published in April 2018 as part of New Generation African Poets (Tano) chapbox series from Akashic books (US). She completed the Creative Writing (Poetry MA) at UEA in 2019 and her poetry has appeared or will appear in Prairie Schooner (US), South Bank Poetry Magazine, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, amberflorazine, Lolwe, ANMLY (US), CUSP anthology and Frieze.

In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and founded the UK's first crowdfunded poetry press Black Sunflowers.