POETRY

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• Wild Women: Women Speak Volumes at SOUND: Plymouth Poetry Festival. A live poetry event with Fiona Benson, Helen Thomas and Jackie Taylor. The Box, Plymouth. 19th April 2026.

• Page of Plymouth Finale Event. A major project celebrating and exploring a lost play by global icon of English literature, Ben Jonson, with new stories about gender, justice and ordinary lives in Plymouth. The Barbican Theatre, 12 April 2026.

• December 2025 - The Twins published.

• July 2023 – Commissioned as 'Roving Poet in Residence' by BBC’s Arena (Your Local Arena Project) & Speaking Volumes, to write four poems for Black History Month (October 2023). These will be performed at 4 cinemas across the UK.

• July 2023 – ‘Metamorphosis’ and ‘Plus 3’ (poems) displayed @ the Box Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth to celebrate celebrating Windrush Generation Plymouth arrivals in the 1950s.

• Jan 2022 – 1562 (poetic volume) published.

• October 2022 - Commission and Performance. 'The Black NHS' (poem), Taunton Arts Centre (2022).

• October 2021 - Commission and Performance. ‘The Life of Mary Seacole’, M Shed, Bristol with Black Artists on the Move.

• July 2021 - ‘Confessions of a Lockdown Mum’ (poem) awarded first prize in a ‘Virtual Living’ Poetry Competition.

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PLAYS

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• Maeve and the 3,000 Black GIs, showcased by Beyond Face at the Exeter Phoenix (2024).

• July 2023 - Jesse performed at the Soapbox Theatre, Plymouth. This play co-created with pupils from Stoke Damerel Secondary School.

• May 2023 – Simity: A Poetic Play  longlisted by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 37 Plays competition (over 2,000 entries).

• March 2023 - Hands (one person monologue) performed at the Exeter Phoenix, Devon as part of Beyond Face, We Are Here to Scratch Night.

• September 2023 – Salve showcased at Theatre Royal Plymouth, as part of Ideas Lab Season.

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PUBLICATIONS

 

(i) BOOKS

Helen Thomas, Black Agents Provocateurs: 250 Years of Black British Writing, History and the Law, 1770-2020 (2020) 450pp.

Helen Thomas, ed. Malady and Mortality: Illness, Disease and Death in Literary and Visual Culture (2016) 351pp.

Helen Thomas, Caryl Phillips (2004) 100pp.

Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (2000) 342pp.

Helen Thomas, V. de Rijke and Lena Ostermark-Johansen, eds., Representations of the Nose in Literature and Art (Middlesex: Middlesex University Press, 2000).

 

 

(ii) CHAPTERS /ARTICLES:

 

Helen Thomas, 'Black Female Poet Performers', Palgrave (forthcoming; 2027)

Helen Thomas, ‘Breast Cancer Autopathographies’ Disability Memoirs, ed. G. Thomas Couser (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Cengage, 2021). 

Helen Thomas, ‘Women Writing Creole Masculinity’, Women’s Writing: Women Writing Men (Taylor and Francis, Dec. 2020).

Helen Thomas, ‘Freeze Frame: Paralysis and Locked in Syndrome in Three Contemporary Texts’ in Malady and Mortality: Illness, Disease and Death in Literary and Visual Culture (Cambridge Scholars, 2016) p. 129-139.

Helen Thomas, ‘The Slave Narrative’ in The Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies, ed. Julia Straub (De Gruyter, 2016) p. 373-390.

Helen Thomas, ‘Slave Narratives and Transatlantic Literature’, in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, ed. John Ernest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) p. 371-390.

Helen Thomas, ‘1950s-1980s: Contextual Introduction’, in Modern and Contemporary Black British Theatre, ed. Mary Brewer, Lynette Goddard, Deirdre Osborne (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) p.17-31.

Helen Thomas, ‘Breast Cancer Autopathographies: The Law of the Body and the Body of the Law’, in Scenes of Intimacy, ed. Jennifer Cooke (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) p.191-210.

Helen Thomas, ‘Romanticism and Abolitionism: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth’, in Romanticism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Routledge Major Work Series (London: Routledge, 2005) Vol. II, p. 253-297.

Helen Thomas, ‘Robert Wedderburn and Mulatto Discourse’, in Early Black British Writing, ed. Alan Richardson and Debbie Lee (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) p. 255-71.

Helen Thomas, ‘The Sphinx’s Nose and the Decipherment of Culture’, in Representations of the Nose in Literature and Art, ed. Helen Thomas, V. de Rijke and Lena Ostermark-Johansen (Middlesex: Middlesex University Press, 2000) p. 149-168.

Helen Thomas, ‘The Politics of Reproduction: Pregnancy, Abortion, Infanticide and the Black Female Slave’, Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Ronit Lentin (London: Zed Press, 1997) p. 184-193.

Helen Thomas, ‘Black on White: Textual Spaces in Black Britain’, Wasafiri: Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures in English, Spring 1999, pp. 5-7.

 

 

PUBLIC TALKS/PERFORMANCES

 

‘Professor Susheila Nasta MBE & Dr Helen Thomas: Black History Month Special’, In Conversation Online Event, Queen Mary University London, 30 October 2020.

‘Virtual Life Poetry Readings’, Black Artists On The Move with TV Presenter,

Aaron Ayiih (Ghana), Poet A Scribe Called Quest (New Orleans) and author, Joy Jones

(Washington D.C), 31 May 2020.

‘Mapping Black Lives in the C18th and C19th’, Birkbeck University, London Arts Week, May 2017.

‘Vulnerability in Three YA Novels’, Padua University (Plenary Speaker), Italy, May 2016.

‘The Modern Sphinx - Medicine, Gender and Empire': C19th Medics, Disease and ‘Passing’, Sensational Men Conference, Falmouth University, April 2015.

5. ‘A Bloodless Revolution of a Different Kind: Sancho, Intertextuality and British Citizenship’, British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies 44th Annual Conference, ‘Riots, Rebellions and Revolutions’, 6th – 8th January 2015, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University.

‘Freeze Frame: Paralysis in Film’, American and Canadian Studies Dept., University of Birmingham, 13th November 2013.

‘Scenes of Intimacy: Symposium’, The Institute of Psychoanalysis, London 19th July 2013.

‘Organising a Conference’, Falmouth University, 16th January 2014

‘Leaving West Africa and the Dutch/English trade to the Caribbean’, Amsterdam University, The Netherlands, 2012.

‘Intimacy, Illness and Death’, Writings of Intimacy in the Twentieth and Twentieth-First Centuries Conference, Loughborough University, September 2010.

‘Performing Blackness in C18th Britain: On Whose Terms?’, Goldsmith’s College, University of London, March 2008.

‘Where Shall We Put this Book? The Development of Libraries and Reading Rooms in C18th and C19th Britain’, The English Subject Centre, University of West England, February 2008.

‘Reading (the) Spaces: The Development of C18th Reading Rooms and Libraries’, English Research Centre, University of Plymouth, 2005.

‘Reading Blackness: Reading Equiano’s Interesting Narrative’, Equiano International Conference, Kingston University, April 2003.

‘Performance, Sexuality and Praxis: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet’, Writing Europe Conference: 2001, University of Amsterdam, April 2001.

‘Colonialism and the Concept of Freedom: Sierra Leone and Liberia’, Defining Colonies Conference: Slavery and Abolition, Queen Mary University of London, April 2001.

‘Reading the Slave Narratives’, African Readerships Conference, Cambridge University, May 1999.

‘Creolising Lesbianisms: Sexual Identity and Autobiography’, SubVersions / InVersions Conference, Goldsmiths College, September 1998.

‘Cultural History in Transition: Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems’, Women and Poetry Conference, Oxford Brookes University, September 1997.

‘Space, the Final Frontier? Romanticism, Gender and Race’, Romantic Boundaries Conference, Sheffield Hallam University, June 1993.

‘Women and Eroticism in Keats’ Poetry’, The Wordsworth Conference, The Lake District, July 1992.

 

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