Cherry Smyth (born 1960) is a London-based, Irish academic, poet, writer and art critic.
Biography
Cherry Smyth was born in Ballymoney, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Until 2024, she taught poetry in Greenwich University's Creative writing department. She had her first collection of poetry published in 2001. She worked on an anthology of women prisoner's writing in 2003 which won the Raymond Williams Community Publishing award. Smyth writes for art magazines including Modern Painters, Art Monthly and Art Review. She is also involved in works on Gender studies.
Criticism of her second collection was positive:
Smyth's third collection, Famished (2019), is a work of documentary poetry which pieces together a history of the Irish Famine. Smyth has performed it in collaboration with the improvisational singer Lauren Kinsella and the musician Ed Bennett throughout Ireland and the UK.
Smyth was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Bibliography Lesbians Talk: Queer Notions, 1992 Normapaths : Jane and Louise Wilson, 1995 Damn fine art by new lesbian artists, 1996 Mandy McCartin: from the street: paintings and drawings, 1996 Butch/femme: inside lesbian gender, 1998 When the lights go up, 2001 Strong voice in a small space : women writing on the iniside / foreword by Martina Cole; introduced and edited by Cherry Smyth, 2002 The future of something delicate, 2005 One wanted thing, 2006 Tatton Park Biennial 2012: Flights of Fancy Test, Orange, 2012 Hold Still, 2013 Famished, 2019 The pleasure threshold: looking at lesbian pornography on film, 1990
References and sources