Jason Allen-Paisant
This three-day creative writing module invites emerging and aspiring poets to explore the ekphrastic mode—a poetic tradition that engages with visual art to inspire layered, resonant writing. Day one opens with an exploration of what makes ekphrastic poetry compelling, focusing on how observation and imagination can transform visual art into poetry. Participants will tackle their first exercise: selecting a photograph or artwork from their daily life and brainstorming ways it evokes personal memory or emotional resonance.
Day two shifts to contemporary examples, such as Jason Allen-Paisant and Victoria Chang, whose works reimagine art to grapple with loss, memory, and shifting notions of selfhood. Inspired by these poets, participants will write poems that imagine a dialogue with an artwork that feels provocative or unsettling. On day three, the emphasis turns to crafting and refining their own ekphrastic poems or prose works, with guidance on how to balance observation and imagination. A final prompt will challenge poets to uncover hidden narratives or emotional depths within their chosen artwork. Through discussion and generative writing, this module offers tools and inspiration to transform visual art into vibrant, resonant poetic expression.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and multi-award-winning poet. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry. His debut poetry collection Thinking with Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize, and was an Irish Times and White Review book of the year. Self-Portrait as Othello, his sophomore book of poems, won the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023 — the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize; it is one of the rare books to have accomplished this feat. His other books include the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire and The Natural World, a collaboration with photographers David Hartt and John Edmonds and curator Nathaniel Stein.
Jason has edited various publications and his work is widely anthologised. His latest publication, The Possibility of Tenderness, a work of literary nonfiction, will be published in March 2025.
Jason holds a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds.
His recent art collaborators include British painter Chris Ofili, the Manchester Art Gallery and the Cincinnati Art Gallery.
Currently, he is full professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and an associate editor of Callaloo Literary Journal.
He lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.
Jason Allen-Paisant’s The Possibility of Tenderness will be out March 2025. Learn more about it here.
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