Janine Bradbury

Janine’s wide-ranging academic criticism on topics such as professional wrestling, racial passing and the tragic mulatta, Grace Jones, African American comedy, and the work of Toni Morrison has been published by Palgrave Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Routledge, and others. Her PhD examined representations of the tragic mulatta in contemporary African American women’s writing (including works by Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Dorothy West, BarbaraNeely and Alice Walker).

One of the key themes connecting Janine’s interests is a concern with how we read, discern, and interpret the embodiment of feeling and identity. From the rapturous response of wrestling fans, to the melodramatic rendering of racial identity in films about passing-for-white like Imitation of Life (1959), Janine’s critical and creative work explores the affective (il)legibility and ambivalence of these cultural texts. How are we meant to feel about these texts (and the people they represent)? How are we supposed to ‘read’ them? What is the relationship between reading, feeling, and identity? And what do we do as readers, teachers, and students when a text resists straightforward interpretation and obvious modes of identification?

Janine debut poetry pamphlet, Sometimes Real Love Comes Quick & Easy (ignitionpress, 2024) explores these questions with a playful look at sentimentality, desire, and popular culture and is the Poetry Book Society’s Autumn 2024 Pamphlet Choice.

Janine’s poetry has been published in Magma, Oxford Poetry, Black Lines, and in the collection Blood & Cord: Writers on Early Parenthood (Emma Press 2023). She was a winner of a 2020 Poetry London Mentoring Prize, was shortlisted for the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, was nominated for a prestigious Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2021, and in 2022, was a finalist for The Aurora Prize for Writing (Poetry).