Prof Bhanu Kapil, Churchill
bk426@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
Bhanu Kapil is a poet and Fellow of Churchill College. She is the author of six books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006; forthcoming in a new edition from Kelsey Street Press, 2022), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2016), and How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020). How To Wash A Heart was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice.
Kapil is the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry from Yale University. From 2000 to 2020, Kapil taught poetry, performance, fiction and contemplative practice seminars at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. In 2019, Kapil was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow. Now based in Cambridge, she is writing towards a new British edition of an intergenre work, Incubation: a space for monsters (Prototype, 2023), a novel, The Secret Garden, and an opera, Monica Belluci of Loveland (in collaboration with London-based dancer/writer, Blue Pieta). Kapil is also a co-researcher for The Glass Mosque, with artist Shahzia Sikander, cultural critic Fred Moten and composer Vijay Iyer, a project curated by Yasmeen Siddiqui (Minerva Projects, New York). In the UK, Kapil is a contributor to Back to Earth, a multi-year interdisciplinary programme at the Serpentine that asks, how can art respond to the climate emergency?
Research Interests
Poetry, performance, art
Selected Publications
A British edition of Incubation: a space for monsters is forthcoming from Prototype in 2023.
