Maria Sledmere was born in Hemel Hempstead, raised in South Ayrshire and now lives in Glasgow. In 2022 she completed a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, working on a project of ‘hypercritique’ which responds to the anthropocene through entanglements of poetry, essay and journaling. Currently she is a tutor and mentor for Beyond Form Creative Writing, and teaches at the University of Glasgow. She is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press, founding editor of the magazine Gilded Dirt and member of A+E Collective. Her poem ‘Ariosos for Lavish Matter’ was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prize, and a work of creative-critical response to the work of Etel Adnan, Tangents, co-authored with Katy Lewis Hood, was long-listed for the Ivan Juritz Visual Arts Prize. A pamphlet, Polychromatics, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Callum Macdonald Award.
Her poems have been widely anthologised in places such as makar / unmakar (Tapsalteerie, 2019), Prototype 2 and Prototype 3(Prototype, 2020/2021), DW Cities: Glasgow (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2022), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) (Pilot Press, 2022), Rewilding: An Ecopoetic Anthology(Crested Tit Collective, 2020), Litmus: the lichen issue(Litmus, 2021), Virtual Oasis: An Anthology of Poetry and AI (Trickhouse Press, 2021), All Becomes Art: Joan Eardley’s Centenary Collection (Speculative Books, 2022) and THE MOON AND THE ECHO(Pilot Press, 2021). Her essays and reviews can be found at -algia, Amberflora, BlueHouse Journal, Coils of the Serpent, MAP Magazine, Jacket2, NOTES, The Poetry School, Futch Press, The Journal for Innovative British and Irish Poetry, Poetry London, Moveable Type, post45, Creative Carbon Scotland, SPAM Plazaand Glasgow Review of Books.
Maria has also worked freelance as a music journalist, writing for publications including GoldFlakePaint, The List, Secret Meeting and The Skinny, and engaged with collaborations and commissions alongside writers, musicians and artists such as Lanark Artefax, Martha Ffion, Colin Herd, Lucian Moriyama, Scott Crawford Morrison, Douglas Pattison, North Sea Dialect, Sophie-Carolin Wagner and Zoee. She co-hosts the podcast URL Sonata and in 2020, with Conner Milliken, ran the workshop series Pop Matters: a studio for thinking the alternative. Her writing has been included in exhibitions including Flesh and Finitude(GeneratorProjects, 2018), Morphology(Six Foot Gallery, 2019) and she exhibited a multimedia work, The Palace of Humming Trees, with curator Katie O’Grady and artist Jack O’Flynn at French Street Studios in 2021. Her visual art can be found in places including Erotoplasty, Tentacular Mag and Datableed, and she has designed book covers for Luminous Press, MOTE, From Glasgow to Saturn, SPAM Press and Veer2. She has contributed to arts festivals and projects including Assembly (Aberdeen), Camarade (London), Civic House Saturday School (Glasgow), The European Poetry Festival (Manchester), Future Currents (Glasgow), Glasgow Goes Green (Glasgow), Ginkgo workshop series (online), NewBridge Project (Newcastle), NEoN festival (Dundee), Peacock Visual Arts (Aberdeen), Stay-at-Home! Fringe Literary Festival(online) and UNFIX (Glasgow).