Jackie Kay

Standard Name: Kay, Jackie
Birth Name: Jacqueline Margaret Kay
Nickname: Jackie
JK 's poetry, plays, and fiction explore issues of divided, displaced, or mixed identity. Her writings probe and challenge assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality with a mixture of pain and humour. She often draws her inspiration from jazz and blues musicians, particularly Bessie Smith and Billy Tipton . JK has also written a memoir about her search for her birth parents, and several children's books, as well as works for radio drama and performance poetry), opera, and audiocassette.
Photo of Jackie Kay taken during the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival. She is wearing brown tinted glasses and a dress with small polka-squares that matches her earrings. she has short black hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Gillian Clarke
GC has contributed poems to more than half a dozen journals, Welsh, English, and American, and most frequently to Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Review, and Poetry Nation Review (PNR). She has reviewed...
Textual Production Winsome Pinnock
The National Theatre (Cottesloe) put on an arresting play for young people by WP entitled Can You Keep a Secret?, part of the New Connections season of plays for the young.
Launched a couple...
Textual Production Gillian Clarke
GC was one of ten poets gathered by Carol Ann Duffy in spring 2013 to spend two weeks, one in each of ten museums in Cambridge, and to craft a poem relating to the museum...
Textual Production Ali Smith
In August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival , three months before publication, AS stated her concern for the future of the public library system itself. As a narrative thread, she collected personal oral library...
Textual Production Jeanette Winterson
Her contributors included Ali Smith on Beethoven 's Fidelio, Anne Enright on Dvorak 's Rusalka, Jackie Kay on Janacek 's The Makropulos Case, Joanna Trollope on Donizetti 's L'Elisir d'Amore, Kate Atkinson
Textual Production Carol Ann Duffy
Contributors included Gillian Clarke (with In a Cardiff Arcade, 1952), Jackie Kay (with Silver Moon, for London's feminist bookshop, 1982-2001), and Liz Lochhead (for the more general Essentials).
Textual Production Grace Nichols
GN , along with poets Barbara Burford , Gabriela Pearse , and Jackie Kay , published a poetry collection entitled A Dangerous Knowing: Four Black Women Poets.
Sander, Reinhard, and Bernth Lindfors, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 157. Gale Research.
235
Textual Production Ruth Padel
This poem was reprinted in Angel. Other poets to appear in this series, each on a different coloured sheet of paper, were Carol Ann Duffy , Judi Benson , Anne Born , Carole Coates
Travel Carol Ann Duffy
In summer 2016 CAD took part in the Shore to Shore Nationwide Poetry Tour with Gillian Clarke , Imtiaz Dharker , and Jackie Kay . Starting at Falmouth in Cornwall, they took in Carlisle...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Kay, Jackie, and Shirley Tourret. Two’s Company. Blackie, 1992.
Kay, Jackie. Why Don’t You Stop Talking. Picador, 2002.
Sulter, Maud. “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues”. Charting the Journey, edited by Shabnam Grewal et al., Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1988, pp. 100-10.
Kay, Jackie. “Wish I was here”. Guardian Weekly, pp. 50-3.
Kay, Jackie. Wish I Was Here. Picador, 2006.