N J Hynes is a UK-based writer currently working on poetry which sits at the intersection of science and art. She has also worked as a journalist, art writer and researcher in Africa, Europe and North America, and as a volunteer advocate for vulnerable migrants.
She spent her childhood in North Minneapolis and then Shakopee, a small town on the Minnesota River. Her first paid job, at age 12, was as a Town Crier at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, where she watched potters, glass blowers, jugglers and magicians perform at close hand.
In 1980 she travelled to Cape Town, where she spent a year as an exchange student. She returned to study at the University of Minnesota and work as a lobbyist encouraging firms to divest themselves of assets in South Africa.
After collecting several degrees in anthropology, she arrived in Britain in 1994 to pursue postgraduate research on West African artists working in London. She has taught at the British Museum, the Photographer’s Gallery and Birkbeck College and written for Untitled, Art Monthly and the Financial Times, among other publications. She is an associate editor at NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and co-curated the first major international show by Depth of Field, a Lagos-based photography collective, at the South London Gallery.
She has also worked as an editor, copy editor and publishing production manager. Her editorial work helped to shape the Institute of Ismaili Studies’ ground-breaking Qur’anic Studies Series, co-published with Oxford University Press.
She returned to poetry in response to 9/11, writing an audio collage inspired by Langston Hughes. She took courses and seminars with teachers including Myra Schneider, Mimi Khalvati and Jane Draycott. In 2009 she enrolled in an MA course in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and graduated with distinction.
Her poetry has appeared in publications including Magma, Mslexia, Long Poem Magazine and The Rialto, and has wone various prizes, including the Battered Moons prize (2019). She has been poet in residence at Greenwich Railway Station and the National Poetry Library; a community-based performance of her Love Song to Greenwich and Woolwich, commissioned by Maritime Radio to celebrate its launch, received an award at the British Community Radio Awards in 2019.
Her first collection, The Department of Emotional Projections, was published by Live Canon in 2014, having won their inaugural first collection prize. In July 2023 Live Canon published a pamphlet of poems she wrote in response to work by prize-winning astrophotographers during lockdown, Tracking Light, Stacking Time.
She is now working on a sequence of poems responding to the night sky in a place known for its exceptional clarity: the Atacama desert. The Atacama is home to 70% of the world’s large telescopes and to the Likan Antay peoples, one community of which hosts the La Wayaka artists’ residency that is supporting her.
Other projects include a poetry and prose memoir based on her experiences of North Minneapolis and South Africa called Learning to be White.
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