BIOGRAPHY


Sara Wingate Gray is a writer, artist and independent research scholar. She has been writing and performing professionally since 1993, beginning with editing and reviewing for the Waterstones’ national teenage book magazine, ‘In Brief’, while in her teens.

She graduated from the University of East Anglia (UEA - Norwich, UK) in 2000 with a BA Honours Degree (First Class) in English Literature & Creative Writing. She helped found the independent small press Pen&inc (based at UEA) while still a student, and went on to become a contributing editor of its international literary magazine Pretext.

In 2002 she founded The Poetry Cubicle, a not for profit interactive experimental arts space.

She has performed and toured with The Poetry Cubicle at venues across Great Britain and beyond, including the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Glastonbury Festival, Norwich Fringe Festival & Amsterdam International Poetry Festival.

From 2004 – 2007 she presented the poetry and spoken word radio programme, ‘The Poetry Cubicle Presents’, on Future Radio FM.

In 2006 she was asked by the BBC to produce a short documentary on her life as a poet for the Video Nation project.

She graduated in 2006 from her two year MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK), under the tutelage of poets Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Jeffrey Wainwright, Michael Schmidt and Linda Chase Broda.

In 2006, as part of her Library and Archive practice-led projects, she designed a live art and library science experiment: the operation and installation of a worldwide free travelling poetry library, with ‘The Itinerant Poetry Librarian’ as its overseer in the knowledge-acquisition process. Contiguously, she is curating a Creative Commons licensed (©©) Digital Audio Archive of Poetry & Sound: an experimental online sonic collage project, exploring how poetry and sound can co-exist, collide and be categorised.

In August 2006 The Guardian newspaper (UK) selected her as one of the fifteen “most inspiring, creative, dynamic women in Britain”.

From February 2007 through June 2008 Sara Wingate Gray was a Visiting Research Scholar at The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives (San Francisco State University, California, USA). The Poetry Center was founded on the basis of a small donation by W. H. Auden in 1954. Outside of the Library of Congress, it is the largest collection of poetry recordings in the United States — much of it rare and of significant historic value. It is currently engaged in a long-term digitization project, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, involving transfer of fragile analog tapes to digital media, significantly enhancing the life-span and public availability of archived recordings.

November 2007 through June 2008 she was concurrently employed as a Digital Archives Consultant at The Poetry Center & Archive, helping to steer the direction of the project. This involved her devising a feasible, efficient and end-user-centred system for enabling the digital cataloging, digitization and digital preservation of The American Poetry Archives – which will see the unique original a/v recordings of such poets as Sylvia Plath, Jack Spicer, William Burroughs, Landis Everson et al digitally accessible for the very first time.

In December 2008 she was awarded the Women In Publishing (UK) New Ventures Award – “for a courageous departure into uncharted territory.”

She is a member of Librarians Without Borders, enjoys attending library conferences in Second Life, and still eats a lot of cous cous.