About this event

Unsafe: Poetry and the Psychology of Enclosure - Karen McCarthy Woolf with Stephen Rudder

Poet Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL will discuss her newly published Unsafe, a long poem moving between Los Angeles and London, text and image, lyric and documentary. The poem offers an unflinching exploration of white space, archival absence and the psychology of enclosure. Attending to body, place and subjectivity, her writing makes legible the pressures of history as they are felt and witnessed. Karen will read from Unsafe followed by discussion with psychotherapist Stephen Rudder, whose clinical and creative work explores the intersection of mental health, race and social structures.

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is a poet, editor, essayist and librettist. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was a Guardian Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was the inaugural poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. In 2025, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England).
 
Stephen Rudder is a psychodynamic psychotherapist practising privately and within the NHS. He is an associate at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where his doctoral research examines the presence of a colonial social order in a Black male clinical dyad. Stephen is an award-winning audio-visual artist who explores themes of mental health through collaboration with community groups, offering profound insights in his cross-disciplinary practice. He has been commissioned by organisations such as UNESCO, Wellcome Trust, Science Gallery International, and King’s College London. Building on this foundation, Stephen actively strives to enhance engagement with the intersection of global majority people and mental health services and has developed and led several successful group projects, including Black Men’s Minds, Hood Mentality, and Undisciplined Thought.

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This lecture will be recorded and available for 7 days after the lecture takes place

© Image: Matthew Kolakowski: Storm Inside

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