William May

Description

William May, Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Southampton, specialises in postwar and contemporary British literature, particularly poetry. He is the editor of Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems and Drawings, and is currently researching mentoring practice in postwar and contemporary British poetry. He also explored the role that mentoring can have in the cultural and economic recovery of UK towns, and recently published a co-authored policy report on literature and regional recovery.

On 8 March 2023, he presented a paper at with the title "Seen and Unseen: Invisible Mentors in UK Poetry" at SOL's English unit as part of the joint seminar about "Immunity and Community: Networks of Transmission" together with Andrew Blades, Bristol University.

Abstract: "Recent decades have seen new mentoring initiatives for both UK poets and reviewers, an upsurge in commercial mentoring services, and a heightened focus by national arts funders on mentoring as a means to stimulate creative and economic development across the UK. The vitality and success of these projects suggests a creative culture eager for formal mentoring, in part to offset the exclusionary potential of edited magazines, creative writing programmes, established presses, or coteries formed around educational privilege. However, mentoring's long history and practice within the literary community is rarely acknowledged or explored, leaving a gap between practice, evaluation, and theory, and limiting the effectiveness of existing schemes.
In this paper, we will uncover the visible and less visible traces of mentoring in contemporary poetry, from named awards and initiatives (the James Berry Poetry Prize, the Roddy Lumsden Memorial Mentorship), to creative ecologies in universities and literature development organisations, to community workshops and reading groups. We will seek to understand how making the practice and process of mentoring more visible can transform the way we think about literary community and participation."

Period	2023 Mar 7 → 2023 Mar 8
Visiting from	University of Southampton (United Kingdom)
Visitor degree	D. Phil. (Oxon)
Country/Territory	United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International