Peggy Riley is Senior Lecturer in Creative & Professional Writing BA and MA Creative Writing.
Peggy teaches on the Creative & Professional Writing BA and the Creative Writing MA courses. Current modules include: Poetry, Fiction, Drama 1 and 2, Writing and Wellbeing (L4), Playwriting, Digital Literature (L5/6), Craft of Writing 2, Professional Practice (L7). She also supervises dissertations for the BA and MA programmes. She is also Level 4 lead.
Peggy has a BA from California State University at Fullerton in Theatre - Playwriting (1988). She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London in 2022. Before lecturing, she worked extensively as a freelance workshop leader in schools, festivals, libraries, arts centres, and prisons as well as for social prescribing.
Peggy is interested in how creative and reflective writing affect wellbeing. Currently, she is developing a writing workbook, Turn the Page: Write your way toward better wellbeing. She is interested in speculative fiction, particularly work on climate change, the plastic crisis, and the uncanny nature of human-nonhuman relationships in the Anthropocene.
Ms Peggy Riley, (01 Sep 2021), Letting it all spill out: the benefits of venting for creative writing teachers and students: Writing in Education. [Journal article]
Ms Peggy Riley, Lockdown Pages: how to write your way through a pandemic, Creative Writing in Practice Symposium. [Conference poster]
Ms Peggy Riley, (21 Oct 2022), The Writing Circle: Creative hope in anxious times: Writing in Education. [Journal article]
Ms Peggy Riley, Uncanny intimacies, London Science Fiction Research Community Annual Conference. [Conference or workshop item]
As a playwright, Peggy has been commissioned and produced off-West End, on tour, site-specifically and for broadcast. Herr short fiction has been shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award, the Bridport Prize, and Mslexia's Short Story Award. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Big Issue, The Spectator and Elle. Her novel, Amity & Sorrow, was published by Little, Brown (US, Canada) and Headline/Tinder Press (UK, Ireland, Commonwealth), as well as in translation for Presses de la Cite, Sonzagno and Orlando in the Netherlands. Recently, she was commissioned to write an essay for The Best, Most Awful Job, published by Elliot & Thompson.www.peggyriley.com
Member of Society of Authors