Canadian Poets Series #22 : J.R. Carpenter

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. They studied Life Drawing and Anatomy at the Art Students’ League of New York and graduated with a BFA (with distinction) in Studio Art with a concentration in Fibres and Sculpture from Concordia University in Montreal in 1995. In 2014 they were awarded a practice-led PhD research degree from University of the Arts London. Their thesis, Writing Coastlines: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks, explores intersections between Performance Writing, Digital Literature, Locative Narrative, and Media Archaeology.

J. R. Carpenter has been using the Internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of experimental texts since 1993. Since that time, their work has been exhibited, published, presented, and performed at museums, galleries, conferences and festivals around the world.

Since the mid-1990s Carpenter has been writing on textile art, new media, and internet history. Her essays, reviews, poems and short fiction have been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and Korean, and published in numerous anthologies and journals. Carpenter is a winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Carte Blanche Quebec Award (2008), the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition (2003 & 2005), the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for Words the Dog Knows, the Dot Award for Digital Literature (2015), and the New Media Writing Prize for The Gathering Cloud (2016). An Ocean of Static, was highly commended for the Forward Prizes 2018. This is a Picture of Wind, was listed in The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2020 and featured in the Digital Storytelling exhibition at the British Library. Measures of Weather [see my review of such here] was The Observer’s poetry book of the month and a finalist for the Laurel Prize 2025 [see an interview with Carpenter around such here]. An Island of Sound has been performed in Edinburgh, London, Edmonton, and Coimbra, and published in Media + Environment. Their latest title is p a u s e. [see my review of such here].

Carpenter is the recipient of grants in literature and new media from the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec, Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Council. They are a fellow of Yaddo, Ucross, Caldera, The Vermont Studio Center, Struts, and The Banff Centre. They were Writer in Residence in the Performance Writing Area at Dartington College of Art in England in 2009. They were President of the Board of Directors of OBORO, an artist-run gallery and new media lab in Montreal, from 2006-2010. They were the Digital Literature and Performance Writing faculty mentor for the In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge Literary Arts residency program at The Banff Centre form its inception in 2010 to its closure in 2014. They were a Fellow at the Eccles Centre For American Studies at the British Library and the Moore Institute at NUI Galway. They were Writer in Residence at University of Alberta September 2020 — May 2021. They were Writer in Residence on the StreetLife project with University of York 2022. They were a Research Fellow at Winchester School of Art, working on the AHRC-funded Weather Reports - Wind as Model, Media, and Experience 2022-2023. In January 2024 they became a lecturer in Creative Practice (Performance Writing) in the School of English at University of Leeds, UK.

They live in Leeds, UK. http://luckysoap.com