Dr Jo Clement, Writer and Interdisciplinary Artist

The 37th Romani Cultural and Arts Company profile is Dr Jo Clement.

Based in North East England, Jo Clement is a working-class poet and interdisciplinary maker of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller ethnicity. She is a Northern Writers’ Award winner (New Writing North) and lectures in English and Creative Writing at Northumbria University. 

Jo holds a PhD on the (in)visbility of ‘the Gypsy’ in visual art and literature. Awarded an inaugural AHRC Northern Bridge scholarship, the research excavates a buried history of GRT identity and culture throughout the long eighteenth-century by making deep readings of book illustrator Thomas Bewick’s wood engraving archive. By exploring print’s ‘black and white’ spaces, the study deconstructs ideologies to make visible institutional failures, omissions, and the privileging of ‘whiteness’ in the canon, scholarly discourse, archival practice and the contemporary publishing industry. Supervised by the poet Professor Sean O’Brien and led by her writing practice, Jo sought to redress instances of injustice and imbalance through innovative methodologies, imagination and voice, resulting in the generation of a new pamphlet of poems and critical study titled Moveable Type

BBC Radio appearances and credits include Enchanted Isle, Northern Drift, Poetry Please, and Start the Week. With support from the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, Jo edited Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology. Since 2018, she has led Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine as its Managing Editor. The Saboteur Awards announced that the press produced the UK’s ‘Best Poetry Magazine’ in both 2022 and 2023. Her poem ‘Paisley’ featured on the London underground as part of the bicentenary of Percy Shelley’s death. ‘Listen’ and ‘Existence’ were commissioned for the Memorial to Europe’s Sinti and Roma Murdered Under Nazism. Her essay ‘Chicken Blood’ was commissioned by the Royal Literary Fund for the Writers’ Mosaic series. 

From 2022, Jo will select and review collections of poetry for the Poetry Book Society. Her highly acclaimed first collection, Outlandish, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2022. It was shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. Jo’s cross-disciplinary creative and critical research continues to examine the poetics and politics of her British Gypsy ethnicity.

Follow this link for more information: https://www.joclement.co.uk