Foreword: Full Fig by Jackie Kay
Introduction
Tasha Alden and Fiona Tolan
1 Opening Out: Jackie Kay’s Many Voices
Nancy K. Gish
2 From Great White Mothers to Black Sisters: Jackie Kay, Feminism and the 1980s
Fiona Tolan
3 “The Presence that Absence Makes”: The Aesthetic of the Secret in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
C.J. Griffin
4 “My Face is a Map”: Place, Truth, and Belonging in Jackie Kay’s Children’s Books
Stacy Creech de Castro and Karen Sands-O’Connor
5 Liminality and Intimacy in Jackie Kay’s Wish I Was Here
Ana García-Soriano
6 Diversifying Modes of National Identity and Belonging in Jackie Kay’s Fiere
Tara Brusselaers and Elisabeth Bekers
7 A Museum of Voices: Ekphrastic Encounters in the Poetry of Jackie Kay
Lourdes López-Ropero
8 Jackie Kay’s Monumental Poetics
Deirdre Osborne
9 The Romance of Scottish Communism: Politics and the Family in Jackie Kay’s May Day
Peter Ely
Biography
Tasha Alden is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British Fiction at Aberystwyth University, UK. She has written on a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, and her research interests include medical humanities, ethics and empathy, the historical novel, literature and theology, and queer writing.
Fiona Tolan is Reader in Contemporary Women’s Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She is author of The Fiction of Margaret Atwood (2023) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism (with Rachel Carroll; 2024).
A fantastic new resource on the crucial work of Scottish poet Jackie Kay, Jackie Kay: Critical Essays breaks boundaries by being the first book-length study of her writing. A rich array of essays explores the whole spectrum of Kay’s work, including her drama and writing for children, and extends all the way to her 2024 collection May Day. Jackie Kay emerges from these pages as among the most significant British writers of our time – always most in earnest and moving when most witty and dry. Her work affirms a deep sense of connectedness to these islands: ‘My country’, she observes, ‘has started to speak my language / And I am no longer alone’.
Elleke Boehmer, FRSL FRHistS, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford
A book that stays true to the generous spirit that is Jackie Kay, this collection illuminates the richness and range of her work. By situating her writing in different critical and theoretical contexts, it makes clear the political and artistic significance it has acquired over many years. Each of the essays offers a thoughtful perspective on an aspect of her career and the impact of this wonderful writer shines through them all.
Glenda Norquay, Professor Emerita, Scottish Literary Studies
