Name
Dr. Joanne Clement
Country of residence
England, United Kingdom
Ethnicity
British Gypsy
Occupation
Writer, Lecturer, Editor and Interdisciplinary Artist
BIO
Dr Jo Clement is an award-winning writer, editor and interdisciplinary artist whose critical research examines – and whose creative practice illuminates – Gypsy and Traveller identity, cultural history and heritage. Her Ph.D. research investigates the presence of Gypsy and Traveller peoples in eighteenth-century British visual culture and literature. The study was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council UK ‘Northern Bridge’ scholarship and was completed in 2019.
Since 2018 Dr Clement has led Butcher’s Dog Publishing as its Managing Editor. The bi-annual arts-poetry journal was awarded ‘Best Magazine’ in 2022 and 2023 in the Saboteur Awards. With support from the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, Jo instituted Wagtail as an imprint of Butcher’s Dog Publishing and edited The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology.
Durham Book Festival and Arts Council England commissioned a new illustrated poetry book ‘Outlandish’ (New Writing North, 2019). The collaboration with fellow Roma writer Damian Le Bas and artist W. John Hewitt documents an invisible Roma history. A new collection of Dr Clement’s poems ‘Moveable Type’ (New Writing North, 2020) received an Arts Council England grant. Shortlisted for Best Poetry Book in the Saboteur Awards, the book is set at the largest gathering of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people in Europe: Appleby Horse Fair, where over 40,000 people have converged annually for over 250 years to celebrate Roma ethnicity and culture.
Dr Clement’s BBC Radio appearances include Enchanted Isle, Northern Drift, Poetry Please, and Start the Week. From 2023 she selects collections for the esteemed Poetry Book Society, founded in 1953 by T. S. Eliot. Her highly acclaimed debut poetry collection ‘Outlandish’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2022) was shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize. She lectures in Creative Writing and diasporic literature at Northumbria University, England.