Kelley Swain is a poet, writer and editor, particularly in art-science crossover genres. She holds a BA in English and an MSc in Medical Humanities, and is a regular contributor to the arts and reviews pages of The Lancet and The Lancet Psychiatry. She created and taught ‘Humanities in Global Health’ at Imperial College London from 2012 to 2014, and from 2009 to 2012 she was poet in residence at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Kelley is the author of poetry collections Darwin’s Microscope (Flambard Press, 2009), Opera di Cera (Valley Press, 2014) and Atlantic (Cinnamon Press, 2014), and the editor of two poetry-and-science anthologies: The Rules of Form: Sonnets and Slide Rules (Whipple Museum, 2012) and Pocket Horizon (Valley Press, 2013). Cinnamon Press published Double the Stars, Kelley’s historical novel about the astronomer Caroline Herschel, in 2013. The Naked Muse, her memoir about working as an artists’ model, is coming out with Valley Press in 2016.
Kelley’s career has been in writing, while her great hobby is learning about cetaceans, cephalopods and molluscs. (Perhaps it should have been the other way round?) Her favourite environment, other than the seaside, is a natural history museum!
