Denise Riley is an English poet and philosopher who began to be published in the 1970s. Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Denise Riley is functioning across the full range of poetic life such as poet, essayist, teacher, editor, researcher and beyond, with her interests extending to politics, history, philosophy, feminist theory and visual art. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, "identity", and philosophy of language, are recognized as an important contribution to feminism and contemporary philosophy.
Life
Riley was educated for a year at Somerville College, Oxford, and graduated from New Hall, Cambridge. She was, until recently, Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A. D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. Her visiting positions also included a writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery in London and visiting fellow at Birkbeck college in the university of London. She was formerly a Writer in Residence at Tate Gallery London, and has held fellowships at Brown University and at Birkbeck, University of London. Riley's reading voice is unclouded and well projected, and that joy in the language entails that each word is cherished enough to be allowed its full resonance. Among her poetry publications are Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair. She lives in London. Denise Riley's treasured Poetry Saying include: "I, too, dislike it. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine. " - Marianne Moore, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, Say Something Back. Her poetry collections include Marxism for Infants ; the volumeNo Fee, with Wendy Mulford; Dry Air ; Stair Spirit ; Mop Georgette ; Selected Poems ; and Say Something Back, which was nominated for a Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection. Riley’s non- fiction prose includes War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother ; 'Am I That Name?': Feminism and the Category of Women in History ; The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony ; and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect.
