Jason Allen-Paisant

poet and decolonial scholar

Jason Allen-Paisant is a lecturer in Caribbean poetry and decolonial thought at the University of Leeds, Leeds, where he is also director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, board member of LUCAS (Leeds University Centre for African Studies), and member of the Poetry Centre.

Allen-Paisant graduated from the University of Oxford, Oxford in 2015, and joined the University of Leeds in 2016 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. In his own research, he explores the ways in which Afro-diasporic artists and communities shape their futures through embodied, living philosophies. Thereby, his work is deeply concerned with poetry; its embodied, spatialized, and sensed ontologies; and the overlaps between poetry and philosophy. His creative writing (poetry, memoir, and critical life writing) addresses issues of time, race, class, and the environmental conditions underpinning Black identity. It has appeared on BBC, in The Guardian, Granta, The Poetry Review, and Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters—whose editorial board he serves on. His book Thinking with Trees (2021) has garnered international critical acclaim.  Allen-Paisant lives and works in Leeds.