Bryn Tales

Dr Bryn Tales joined the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law in May 2021. Bryn holds an MA in English Literature with Creative Writing after graduating at The University of Sheffield in 2012. He was awarded the Hossein Farmy Scholarship in 2015, and his subsequent Creative Writing doctoral thesis, 'A Poetic Ethnography of the South Yorkshire Coalfield Following Neoliberalism’ (2019) sought to outline and explore the potential of lyrical strategies as an aesthetic response to the challenges of representing the testimonies of the post-mining community. He is a member of the Electronic Literature Organization. 

Bryn's research interests include:

• Ethnography and Auto-Ethnography; the relationship between narrative, identity and place.
• Electronic Literature, especially digital forms of lyrical poetry
• The intersection of finance and literature, especially with regards to cryptocurrency and blockchains, semiocapitalism and meme culture. 
• Experimental poetry; particularly procedural and generative forms
• Archival Research in Creative Writing
• Ekphrastic Literature

Bryn's poetry has been published by Routledge, Smith/ Doorstop, Occursus, Epizootics Zine, and the University of Sheffield among others. His article ‘Salvaging the Symbol in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead’, was published by the Edinburgh University Press’s Comparative Critical Studies in 2017. Bryn's chapter 'Insecurity During and After the PhD' with Dr Jessica Moriarty was published by Routledge in 2020. He is currently working on a digital generative poetry collection in collaboration with New Zealand artist Rich Poole. 

Bryn is a writer and curator at gm.studio, a generative arts platform.

Bryn has worked with the University of Brighton’s C21 Research project, culminating in a chapter written with Dr Jessica Moriarty entitled ‘Insecurity During and After the PhD’ in Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy, Moriarty, J. (ed.), published by Routledge in 2020.

He has delivered papers at conferences across the world, including, ‘Hostile Spaces in Literature and the Arts: Images and Metaphors’ at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2017; Louisiana State University’s ‘Rendering the Ritual’ conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2018; ‘Press "s" to overlay’: the fixed-fluid potentials of NFT poetry' at the conference, ‘At Land and Sea: Topographical Imagination and the Moving Image’ in Istanbul's Bilgi University, 5-6th May 2023, and "'It's Time for Poets to Get Rich!' The Rise and Fall of Etherpoets" for 'Trusting and Distrusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature’, at University College Dublin, 7-9th June 2023.

Bryn is a Fellow of Advance HE. His teaching focuses on nurturing supportive and dynamic learning spaces where students gain the confidence to share their ideas and work. As such, he is keen to grow inclusive communities in which writers may feel secure enough to experiment and take the necessary risks in order to fulfil their potential as artists and writers. The empowerment of students through study, workshopping skills and digital tools can thus begin to enact meaningful change, both in students’ own lives, and in wider society. He has almost 15 years of experience of working with students at every level across Yorkshire after becoming a Qualified Teacher in 2008.

Bryn currently teaches on Teesside's English Studies and Creative Writing BA, including as Module Leader: On and Off the Page: Critical and Creative Skills in Practice; Creative Writing Lab: Experimental Writing, and the Creative Writing Project. At MA level, Bryn acts as a Module Leader on Writing and the Self, and supervises students for their Creative Writing Projects. On the MA Creative Writing by Distance Learning, Bryn acts as Module Leader for Writing and the Self, Core Skills, and the Professional Writer in the World. 

PhD and Research Opportunities

Bryn welcomes enquiries from prospective research students interested in Ethnography and Auto-Ethnography; the relationship between narrative and identity;  Experimental poetry, particularly digital, and/or procedural and generative forms; Archival Research in Creative Writing.

Bryn is Director of Studies for Jilly Johannsen and her Project: Blabbermouth: A Poetic Autoethnography Set Around Two Reservoirs, and second supervisor for PhD student, Bryan Nyary.