Bio

Abigail Ardelle Zammit is from Malta and has had poetry and reviews published in a variety of international journals including Matter, Boulevard, Gutter, Myslexia, Poetry International, The SHOp, Iota, Aesthetica, Freefall, Ink, Sweat and Tears, High Window, The Ekphrastic Review and Tupelo Quarterly. Abigail’s two collections of poetry are Voices from the Land of Trees (Smokestack, 2007), and Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (SPM, 2015), which won second prize in the Sentinel Poetry Book Competition. Abigail holds a PhD in Creative Writing (Lancaster). Her most recent manuscripts have already been shortlisted in three international competitions and she is currently working on a new project featuring metre and desert landscapes. Abigail has been teaching Advanced level English literature for the past seventeen years. She also taught creative writing at the University of Malta for ten years, having convened and planned the first ever creative writing workshops at the university.

Project

My intention is to write a sequence of formal and experimental poems inspired by desert landscapes and expressed through the body's consciousness. Each poem will engage with form as a political vehicle, giving voice to the complex interior and exterior interactions occurring at the intersections of self, ecology and social context. In my case, engaging with the global crisis will translate itself into an attempt to push lyrical language towards its disappearance, so each metrical poem will be written with the intention of being dismantled, erased, then reconstructed out of its fragments.