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 Features Carol Ann Duffy
She selected slightly more carols by women than by men, and recalled that Christina Rossetti 's In the Bleak Midwinter was the result of a commission from Scribner's Monthly in 1872. Her own contribution concerns...
Performance of text Carol Ann Duffy
On the Shore to Shore Nationwide Poetry Tour in summer 2016 with Gillian Clarke , Imtiaz Dharker , and Jackie Kay , plus other poets who joined in their public readings when the tour stopped...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
The sixty poets were each commissioned for a poem marking a particular year. They included Gillian Clarke (1955: Running Away to the Sea), Ruth Fainlight (1963: World Events), Liz Lochhead (1966: Photograph, Art...
Intertextuality and Influence Carol Ann Duffy
Scottish poet Jackie Kay acknowledges CAD 's help and encouragement in her poetry collection The Adoption Papers, 1991.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. Carol Ann Duffy. Northcote House.
17
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).
Family and Intimate relationships Carol Ann Duffy
CAD met the Scottish poet Jackie Kay , with whom she began a long-term relationship.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. Carol Ann Duffy. Northcote House.
17
Residence Carol Ann Duffy
CAD moved to Manchester, to live there with Jackie Kay .
“The Knitting Circle”. London South Bank University: Lesbian and Gay Staff Association.
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 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...

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.