Prof Bhanu Kapil, Churchill
bk426@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
Bhanu Kapil is a poet and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. She was previously an artist by-fellow of Churchill College, and a Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow in the Faculty of English (2019-2020). In 2020, Kapil retired from Naropa University, a private liberal arts college in Boulder, Colorado, after twenty years. As a professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she taught seminars and workshops on narrative and architecture, poetry, fiction, contemplative practice, and performance art.
Kapil is the author of six full-length books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), 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. Two new, non-identical editions of Incubation (out of print for seven years in the U.S.) were published by Prototype (UK) and Kelsey Street Press (USA) in 2023. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance: scores, essays and reflections is published by the87 Press in October 2025. This collection is co-authored with Blue Pieta, a multi-disciplinary artist, dramaturg and dancer with whom Kapil has been collaborating since 2022, often rehearsing in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio.
Kapil is also the author of many pamphlets and chapbooks: THREADS, co-written with Sandeep Parmar and Nisha Ramayya (Clinic Publishing, 2018), Entre-Ban (Vallum Press, 2017), Treinte Ban: notes for a novel never written (New Herring Press, 2013), a poem-essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues (Belladonna Press, 2010), THE BODY THAT DOESN'T BELONG TO YOU ANYMORE, ([2nd Floor Projects], 2008), Water-damage: a map of three black days (Corollary Press, 2007), The Wolfgirls of Midnapure (Belladonna Press, 2002), and Autobiography of a Cyborg (Leroy Press, 2000). Installations include a poetry sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds), a commission for The Weight of Words exhibition (2023), and Formidable Sparkles at The Printed Room, SALTS, Basel (2018). Kapil has developed performances for the ICA, Serpentine Galleries, Soho Poly Theater and The Place in London, most recently in collaboration with dramaturg/performer Blue Pieta. Catalogue contributions include poems to accompany exhibitions by Shahzia Sikander (Cincinnati Art Museum) and Bharti Kher (Arnolfini, Bristol, and Tate Modern, St.Ives). Other art writing contributions include poems written for The Animal Within (Mumok, Vienna), a poetic essay and film to accompany a retrospective of the work of Beverley Buchanan (Art Academy of Copenhagen) and a performance/poem to accompany a recent exhibition at Murray Edwards College, The Goddess, the Deity and the Cyborg. Kapil is also writing and thinking towards a collaboration, The Glass Mosque, with Shahzia Sikander, Fred Moten, Vijay Iyer, and others, forthcoming from Minerva Projects in New York. A work of speculative fiction, Pinky Agarwalia: The Biography of a Child Saint in Ten Parts, was published in 2020 by Ignota Books, as the preface of Unknown Language by Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey. A science-fiction story appears in The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by Sarah Shin and So Mayer (Silver Press).
Kapil is the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry from Yale University, a Fellowship from the Royal Society of Literature and the 16th International Poetry and People Prize (China). Two conferences on her work took place in 2024 and 2025, in France: at the Poets and Critics Symposium in Paris, and in Mulhouse (Université de Haute-Alsace.) Her current practice is grounded in performance and collaboration. In 2024 and 2025, Bhanu was also part of The Dark Reading Group convened by Katrina Palmer, artist-in-residence at The National Gallery. A public event took place in darkness at The National Gallery.
Forthcoming events, performance decompressions and publication news can be found at Kapil's blog, Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?
Research Interests
Poetry, performance, collaboration, experimental writing, diasporic forms.
Selected Publications
https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/product/incubation-a-space-for-monsters/
https://www.kelseystreetpress.org/product-page/incubation-a-space-for-monsters
https://www.waterstones.com/book/autobiography-of-a-performance/bhanu-kapil/blue-pieta/9781068751592
https://minervaprojects.org/portfolio/project-7-shahzia-sikander-fred-moten-vijay-iyer-bhanu-kapil/
https://www.silverpress.org/products/the-word-for-world
