Tanya Shirley
About Me
Tanya Shirley is the author of She Who Sleeps with Bones (Peepal Tree Press, 2009) and The Merchant of Feathers (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) which was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award 2014 and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize 2015. Her third poetry collection, Riddled (Peepal Tree Press), is forthcoming in 2026.
Tanya’s work has been featured on BBC World Service, BBC Front Row, Scottish Poetry Library, www.poetryarchive.org and translated into Spanish and Polish. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Unwritten: Caribbean Poems After the First World War ed. by Karen McCarthy Woolf, To Coventry by Sun: Poems from Twin Cities ed. by Jane Commane, New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology ed. by Kei Miller, Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World ed. by Catherine Barnett and Tiphanie Yanique, Atlanta Review, The Normal School and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
She Who Sleeps With Bones
The Merchant of Feathers
Riddled
Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry
She Who Sleeps with Bones provides delightful discoveries and breath-stopping surprises for the keen reader of these poetic ceremonies of healing, hope and upheaval. The sudden shifts from the spiritual to the material or alternatively from the ordinary matters of fact to the extraordinary insights of intuition and clairvoyant vision or from the comforts of the familiar and familial silences to the upheavals of frank disclosures — all these shifts coupled with the use of the unexpected turn of phrase, the reinvigoration of the taken-for-granted and the subtle engagement of deep emotion — provide startling revelations and convey the power of Shirley’s poetry.
Professor & Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies & Decolonial Practice at the University of Alberta
Tanya Shirley is a poet with an urgent need to tell stories, to preserve them and share them, and in doing so perhaps help to shore up and preserve a wider shared identity. She has honed her craft with intent, like any good writer who reads other writers and teaches literature, but she has also dug deep into her emotional life and brought rare trophies back, ‘like a pirate’s treasure’
Shirley never reduces women to stereotypes. This is one of the book’s greatest strengths. …With crisp, original images, impeccable line breaks, rhythms frequently drawn from dancehall, and a bold heart, Shirley gives readers the eyes to grind through stones.
The Jamaica Observer
Tanya Shirley’s The Merchant of Feathers is provocative, explosive and brutally imaginative…This is poetry that breathes…this is literary shapeshifting at its best. She can be loud and edgy; comforting and sublime; sacred and profane, while using colour, tone and cadence with precision.
Kaieteur News
In the deftly searching poems of She Who Sleeps with Bones, Tanya Shirley considers how memory revolts from oblivion, what it can mean to be ‘haunted by the fruit’ of desire – sexual, political, the desire for an ‘uncomplicated legacy,’ for home when home exists only as a memory we cannot trust entirely, a space we fear even as we continue to go back there. These poems startle, stir, provoke equally with their intelligence and their music. A wonderful debut.