Isabel Galleymore

Isabel Galleymore is a poet and academic focused on ecopoetics and the environmental humanities. She is an associate professor in creative writing at the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom.  

As a Radcliffe fellow, Galleymore is working on her second collection of poetry, which explores the role of cuteness in our encounters with the natural world. From anthropomorphic cartoon characters to the manner in which we hold conversations with our much-loved pets, this work examines the relationships among cuteness, commodification, and care in an age of ecological crisis.  

Galleymore’s debut collection, Significant Other (Carcanet Press, 2019), won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2020 and was shortlisted for Forward’s Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize, and Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in such journals as the London Review of Books, Poetry, the Poetry Review, and the Times Literary Supplement and has been broadcast on the BBC’s Radio 3, Radio 4, and World Service. She recently published a monograph, Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Galleymore earned a master’s in creative writing from the University of St Andrews and a PhD in English literature from the University of Exeter.