Dr Nasser Hussain
Senior Lecturer Leeds Beckett
- Leeds
Nasser Hussain's writing and research interests revolve around contemporary poetry and poetics.
Media
Biography
His constraint-based book SKY WRI TEI NGS, published with Toronto’s Coach House Books in late 2018, is a collection in which every word is an IATA airport code. His second book with Coach House, love language, was released in the Autumn of 2023. He is currently working on a number of new projects, including a book of visual poems about ‘punctuation’.
Industry Expertise
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Wilfrid Laurier University’s Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence
2024
Faculty, Banff Center for the Arts
2023
University of Windsor Writer in Residence
2019
Languages
- English
Media Appearances
The Verb
BBC Radio 4 radio
2024-01-12
Ian McMillan explores the wonderfully different ways we use language with poets Daljit Nagra, Nasser Hussain and Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa.
Free Thinking
BBC Radio 4 radio
2021-06-29
The poets Kayo Chingonyi, Paisley Rekdal and Nasser Hussain join Florence Hazrat, who studies punctuation, for a conversation about experimentation, hosted by Sandeep Parmar.
How to notice the glaringly obvious
TEDxLeedsBeckettUniversity online
February 2020
Noticing things is hard. Noticing things is political. Noticing things is natural. What do we do when we notice things? Dr Nasser Hussain will explore the connection of ‘noticing’ to the importance of acting.
Constraints spark creativity for writer-in-residence
University of Windsor online
2019-01-15
Writer Nasser Hussain slaps on figurative handcuffs, then puts pen to paper.
UWindsor’s current writer-in-residence, he recently published SKY WRI TEI NGS, a book of poems written entirely from the three-letter international codes for airports. One day last week, he began working on poems that would be easy to carve into a desk because the words contain no letters with curved lines. His working title: “Poems I can Write with a Knife.”
Dr. Hussain is a master of constraint-based writing. “It’s fun,” he said. “I don’t ever want my poetry to be hard to understand or stuffy.”
New Sentences: From Nasser Hussain’s ‘SKY WRI TEI NGS’
The New York Times Magazine online
2019-01-03
Review by Sam Anderson
'While most of us use airport codes only functionally, Nasser Hussain uses them poetically. Out of the raw material of these unpromising nuggets, he has assembled, ingeniously, an entire book of poems.'
Articles
The Uncritical Mass
Tank MagazineCo-authored with Stehapnie Sy-Quia
2024
The critic plays a vital role in shaping how a book is received by its audience, indeed sometimes, whether it receives an audience at all. The UK’s largely white and Anglocentric critical culture however, is ill-equipped to treat writers of colour with the level of care they deserve.
Performing Ketjak: The theater of the observed
Postmodern Culture2009
