Description
Our panel will explore the legacy of Sylvia Plath, a pioneering Yorkshire writer who was ahead of her time.
Sylvia Plath was one of the 20th century’s most iconic writers, captivating and inspiring readers and authors alike. Sixty years on from her untimely death, Plath’s unflinching, confessional style of writing continues to influence writers, and her book, The Bell Jar, has inspired countless people around the world to become poetry lovers, or even poets themselves.
Our panel includes Heather Clark, internationally renowned Plath biographer, Sarah Corbett, who edited the 2022 anthology, After Sylvia – a collection of new writing celebrating the work of Sylvia Plath, and the astonishing poet, Degna Stone, who contributed to the anthology.
Together, they’ll dive into her cross-generational legacy, from her impact on contemporary fiction and writing about mental health to the complexities of untangling her life and work as a 21st century reader.
About the Authors
Sarah Corbett
Sarah Corbett has published five collections of poetry, including A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion Poetry 2018), and the verse-novel And She Was (Pavilion Poetry, 2015). Her work has been shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot poetry prizes, and widely translated and anthologised. She also writes fiction, and has won two Northern Writer’s fiction awards; she is currently working on her sixth collection of poems and a novel. Sarah and is co-editor of After Sylvia: Poems and Essays in Celebration of Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches Press, 2022), and in October 2022 she directed the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival. Sarah is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, and lives in Hebden Bridge.
Degna Stone
Degna Stone’s writing pulls toward the dark seam of life, exploring the troubling and unsettling cracks in society. They have written four poetry pamphlets and their debut full-length poetry collection Proof of Life on Earth is available from Nine Arches Press. Their poetry also appears in Ten: Poets of the New Generation and A Mighty Stream (Bloodaxe), Writing Motherhood (Seren), Urban Myths and Legends and Some Cannot Be Caught (The Emma Press), Crossings (Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts) and Filigree (Peepal Tree Press), and is forthcoming in More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry(Canongate Books). They are a fellow of The Complete Works III, Obsidian Foundation and Peepal Tree’s Inscribe programme. They received a Northern Writers award in 2015 and a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2019.
Heather Clark
Heather Clark is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, which won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism and the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Red Comet was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2021, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LA Times Book Prize. Clark is also the author of two other award-winning books on postwar poetry: The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Library, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York, and is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield. She is currently working on a biography of Anne Sexton and a group biography of midcentury American women poets in Boston.
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