Jennifer (JL) Williams
Home address:
65/2 Great Junction Street, Edinburgh, EH6 5HXMobile:
07979 504 608Email:
jlwpoetry@gmail.comWebsite:
jlwpoetry.googlepages.comBRAW network:
noLL funded:
yesBiography:
JL Williams was born in New Jersey and studied at Wellesley College with the poet Frank Bidart. She has been published internationally in a number of journals including Aesthetica, The Red Wheelbarrow, Cutting Teeth, The Wolf and Poetry Salzburg Review and has work coming out in Poetry Wales, Fulcrum and Stand.
Since moving to Edinburgh in 2001 she has been active both as a writer and in the performing arts as a director and producer, most recently of the performance art cabaret Neue Liebe. She was awarded a grant from the Scottish Arts Council for a collaboration entitled chiaroscuro pentimenti with composer Martin Parker and artist Anna Chapman.
JL Williams is currently studying at the University of Glasgow on the Creative Writing MLitt programme. She was a writer in residence at the Words Expo 2008 at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow
About writer's work:
This past year I focussed on writing poetry about love in war. The collection’s theme is the love between Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad and is supported by poems that range in time and space, taking many wars (and more general territories and landscapes of war; body, heart, mind) into consideration while attempting to balance a realistic apprehension of the brutality of war with lighter contemplations of beauty, peace, memory, hope and survival.
Another project that is in progress is the editing and production of Triangle, an experimental journal that combines words, music, visuals, and performance. Forty texts have been written by Glasgow University staff, PhD and MLitt students that have been set to music by RSAMD students and will be assembled.
Finally I have founded an experimental collective named SHIFT. Our first goal is to write a collaborative novel of three voices (each in a different 'person' i.e. first, second, third) speaking from within one body that has just undergone a heart transplant. I am concerned with the following themes for this project: the text as body, translation/communication, displacement-colonialism-exile, disease, freedom, anatomy/dissection/design.
For next year I have conceived of a entitled The Linen Tyers. It is the story of survivors of a genetic apocalypse that has destroyed most of the human race and the natural world. These survivors embark from an island off the coast of Scotland on a pilgrimage across the wasteland that is Europe toward a mythical centre of restorative absolution that their leader, once a geneticist himself, believes will engender a future. The story is a means to write a new version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and as the Linen Tyers journey they metamorphose into various creatures, machines, objects, ideas. This project will be poetry-based but will also involve a variety of writing forms/genres including prose and experimental text and image combinations, even sound and visuals as I am very interested in the Fluxus-style generation of intermedia.
Language:
EnglishAge groups:
Teens, Adults