Selected Poems

Roz Kaveney has been actively committed to gay, feminist and trans politics since the early 1970s. She helped found Feminists against Censorship and was deputy chair of Liberty in the 90s - she is still an active voice in print and online journalism and in social media. Wearing other hats, she has written extensively on popular culture in books like Teen Dreams and Reading The Vampire Slayer, developing an informal theory about what she calls the sense of 'thick texts' - the idea that it is useful to read most works of art with a sense of context, the other works they might have been, the effect of influence and the means of cultural production. After abandoning poetry in her twenties, she returned to it in her late fifties, adopting an aggressive formalism as a way of queering the canon, writing poems on subjects excluded from the tradition by prejudice. Her first collection, Dialectic of the Flesh, has been shortlisted for awards including the Lambda. Well known for her sf reviewing, and for her involvement in a number of significant anthologies, she has returned to writing fiction - most recently, her epic fantasy sequence Rhapsody of Blood has received rave reviews in both the genre press and the mainstream. Roz grew up working-class, queer and temporarily Catholic in London and Wakefield; she is embarrassed at how totally she fits a particular 'got the memo in childhood' trans narrative. Active in left politics from her teens, she was foolish enough to delay transition until her late twenties. She works in publishing and as a literary journalist.