Maria Sledmere

Maria Sledmere is a DFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She holds an MA in English Literature and MLitt in Modernities, also from the University of Glasgow. Working across visual art, sound, literature, and theory, her practice explores creative-critical approaches to Anthropocene aesthetics and the everyday. Maria is a member of A+E Collective, a group of artists and writers forging links between art and ecology in curatorial and collaborative practice, including a reading platform, BIOSYSTEMS, for galvanizing ecological thought. She is also a music journalist and editor at SPAM Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, and Gilded Dirt magazine. She has worked with artists and musicians including Lanark Artefax, North Sea Dialect, Max Parnell, and Scott Morrison on multimedia projects and performances, from The Absent Material Gateway (2017) to Pure Sound: Traversing the Ambient Vernacular (2019). She has performed at events including SJ Fowler’s Camarade series, SPAM/Glasgow International’s That’s Hot! and the European Poetry Festival. In 2019, she published three poetry pamphlets: lana del rey playing at a stripclub (Mermaid Motel), nature sounds without nature sounds (Sad Press) and Rainbow Arcadia (Face Press). Her poem “Ariosos for Lavish Matter” was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and her work was included in makar / unmakar, a recent anthology of contemporary poets in Scotland, edited by Calum Rodger and published by Tapsalteerie.

Photo by Sam Torbett-Schofield.