Jay Bernard

Jay Bernard came to comics via poetry; their first pamphlet, Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (2007), was followed by a graphic poem in City State (2009). In the interim, they produced graphic reviews for culturewars.org.uk and penned a strip entitled Budo.

Read a conversation between writers Jay Bernard, Dante Micheaux, and Oluwaseun Olayiwola on Transfigurations: Collected Poems, a landmark volume containing all eight major poetry works by the legendary Black American poet, playwright, and polymath, Jay Wright. Together, they trace critical, audience, and reader perceptions of Wright's work over time, as well as why Wright has been historically overlooked in the global literary sphere in comparison to contemporaries like Wole Soyinka. The conversation is interspersed with two of Wright's poems from the volume, as well as several other excerpts and fragments.

In December 2025, writer and artist Jay Bernard spoke to the experimental vocalist, composer, and movement artist Elaine Mitchener at the University of Cambridge, following a thirty-minute performance by Mitchener. Accompanied by an introductory note from Bernard, read their discussion on the multidisciplinary nature of Elaine's work, the evolution of grassroots activism, her influences ranging from Jamaican music to 1970s-80s American poetry and rap, sound and improvisation across music and poetics, the ubiquity of the 'archive', and much more. This piece is commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 127: Solidarities.