Zoë Brigley (also Zoë Brigley Thompson) is a Welsh-American creative writer and academic.

She is author of three books of poetry published by Bloodaxe: Hand & Skull (2019), Conquest (2012), and The Secret (2007). All three were UK Poetry Book Society Recommendations, as well as winning an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, being longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for the best international writers under 40, and being commended for the Forward Prize.

Recent poetry projects include translating the work of medieval Welsh poet, Gwerful Mechain, in Aubade After a French Movie (2021), writing about the aftermath of trauma in Into Eros (2022), an art/poetry chapbook from Salo Press: Lycanthrope (2024), and a collaboration with poets Jenny Mitchell and Roy McFarlane in Family Name (2023).

She also writes prose and has a collection of nonfiction essays: Notes from a Swing State: Writing from Wales and America (Parthian, 2019) as well as a co-written prose chapbook with Kristian Evans: Otherworlds.

She is the current editor of Poetry Wales and is a poetry editor at British indie publisher, Seren Books. With Kristian Evans, she edited 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren 2021), and she was editor with Evans and Rob A. Mackenzie on the “dwelling” issue of Magma Poetry.

Her writing appears in Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, The Chicago Review, Australian Book Review, PN Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales and elsewhere. 

As an academic, she researches literature, film, trauma, violence against women and minorities, and more recently eco-justice. She co-edited the academic volume Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives with Sorcha Gunne. With students, she ran a podcast on anti-violence advocacy issues at SinisterMyth.com. Her academic peer-review or book publications include:

• “The Theme Park as Simulation of American Rape Culture: #MeToo and the Problem of Justice in HBO’s Westworld”, Television & New Media, 2024.
• "The (Alt)right to rape: violated white masculinities in the Alt-right, and the film Nocturnal Animals.” Feminist Media Studies, 2018. 
• "Happiness (Or Not) After Rape: Hysterics and Harpies in the Media Versus Killjoys in Black Women's Fiction." The Journal of Gender Studies 26.1, 2016.
• "Beyond Symbolic Rape: The Insidious Trauma of Conquest in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Eileen Chang’s “Lust, Caution”." Feminist Formations28.3, 2017.

Her current projects include editing the Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Poetry in the UK and Ireland.

Curriculum Vitae