Harriet Tarlo is a poet, academic and organiser concerned with place, landscape and environment. Her writing is most often composed outside. Writing within the Anglo-American open form tradition, she makes work for the wall, and for performance, as well as books, artists’ books and journals.

Collaborations which illuminate the environment

Tarlo’s work is highly sensitive to the environment, always bringing deep insights in the most concise and precise language. She works extensively in collaboration with artists, environmentalists, geographers, botanists and local communities in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Recent projects include working with geographer Jon Bridge and the Wildlife Trust, on the AHRC funded Hydrospheres, with scientist Nicola Hemmings, on Royal Society funded project, Every Bird a Nest and, with artist Judith Tucker, on Arts Council funded Hideaway (the Lincolnshire saltmarsh).

Work with Judith Tucker

Tarlo collaborated for twelve years with Tucker (1990-2023), exhibiting widely here and abroad (France, U.S., China) and publishing five artists’ books with Wild Pansy Press. Tarlo and Tucker showed drawings and poetry from Outfalls with Groundwork Gallery in 2017. They also organised an accompanying symposium on rewilding. Tucker was working with Veronica Sekules and painter Barbara Howey on a Plant Power show for Groundwork Gallery in 2025. The show goes ahead with work from the project Tucker and Tarlo were engaged on at the time of her death, ‘Verges’. Tarlo and Sekules will curate an interdisciplinary day around plants in the spring.

Eco poetry and Solo publications

Harriet Tarlo’s solo books are published by Shearsman, Etruscan, and Guillemot Presses. Her anthology on radical landscape poetry, The Ground Aslant (2011) is a key text in the field, and she had edited special features on women and ecopoetics for How2 (2008), on ecopoetics for Plumwood Mountain (2017) and, with Tucker, on cross-disciplinary environmental art for the journal Green Letters (2019).

Harriet Tarlo has taught Creative Writing for thirty years, at Bretton Hall College and, since 2007, at Sheffield Hallam University where she is Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics.