Andrea Brady was born in Philadelphia in 1974. She studied for a BA at Columbia University and an MPhil and PhD at Cambridge. Her thesis on funeral elegy in the seventeenth century examined the interplay of poetics and ritual in the poetry of dying (later published as English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century). She worked at Brunel University from 2002-2007, and since then has worked at Queen Mary University of London, where she is Professor of Poetry, established the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now. She is also co-publisher of Barque Press.

Andrea’s books of poetry include Desiring Machines (Boiler House, 2021), The Blue Split Compartments (Wesleyan, 2021), The Strong Room (Crater, 2016), Dompteuse (Book*hug, 2014), Cut from the Rushes (Reality Street, 2013), Mutability: Scripts for Infancy (Seagull, 2012), and Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (Krupskaya, 2010). She has performed in Europe, Canada, the US, Lebanon, and Chile, and has been invited to speak about poetry by the British Academy, British Council, the BBC, the Arts Council, and the Poetry Society. Her poems have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Slovene, Slovak, Finnish, Greek, Catalan, and Croatian, and are the subject of a large number of critical essays.

Andrea’s research was supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship (2014-15) and in 2017-18 she was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where she wrote her forthcoming book Poetry and Bondage (Cambridge University Press, autumn 2021). She lives in Hackney with her partner and three children.