Rate My Professor Lynley Edmeades

Dr. Lynley Edmeades is a lecturer in the English and Linguistics Programme within the Division of Humanities at the University of Otago, where she teaches poetry and creative writing. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Otago in 2017, with a doctoral thesis titled 'The Hear and Now: Sound and Technology in the Avant-Garde Poetics of Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and Caroline Bergvall.' Prior to this, she completed an MA in Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University Belfast. Her academic career at Otago includes supervision roles, for which she received the Division of Humanities Supervisor of the Year award in 2025 from the Otago University Students' Association. Edmeades coordinates aspects of the Master of Creative Writing programme and delivers seminars in the English and Linguistics series.

Edmeades' research specializations encompass poetry, poetics, and sound studies, with a focus on avant-garde literature. She is the current editor of the literary journal Landfall, appointed in April 2021, and has edited issues such as Landfall Tauraka 250 (2025) and Strong Words #3: The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition (2023). Her poetry collections include As the Verb Tenses (Otago University Press, 2016), Listening In (Otago University Press, 2019), and the collaborative Bordering on the Miraculous with artist Saskia Leek (Massey University Press, 2022); both As the Verb Tenses and Listening In were longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Poetry, with the former also shortlisted for the UNESCO Asja Bakić Annual Award for Women's Poetry. Her creative nonfiction work Hiding Places (Otago University Press, 2025) explores motherhood, creativity, and literary analysis. Academic publications include 'Affect and the Musication of Language in John Cage’s “Empty Words”' (Comparative Literature, 2016). Edmeades held the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury and Artist in Residence at Massey University in 2018. She was the first recipient of the Lavinia Winter Fellowship in 2009, received highly commended recognition in the Landfall Essay Competition in 2017, and was shortlisted for the Calibre Prize. Her poetry and essays appear in Best New Zealand Poems (2016, 2018) and have been translated into multiple languages, contributing to contemporary New Zealand literature.