Autumn Widdoes

About

A photo of the writer Autumn Widdoes.

My Creative CV

My Academic + Creative CV

WHAT I AM CURRENTLY WORKING ON:

As of June 2026 – in order of my current attention to them:

  1. My first collection of poems
  2. Wunderkammer, my Substack (please subscribe to my newsletter for updates!)
  3. A screenplay about the March 11, 2011 Tsunami in Japan.
  4. The third of a trilogy of plays set in Las Vegas (Yucca Mountain, Roulette, and Uncanny Valley)
  5. My play LAME C(ity)++ – editing again to update to the year 2026.
  6. A series of essays on grief and writing (here and here)
  7. An experimental hybrid manuscript that merges poetry, dramatic writing, memoir /creative nonfiction, and fiction together

ARTISTIC MINI-STATEMENT:

I’m a poet, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, performance artist, editor, and producer. Language is the central tool I use in all the mediums and genres I work in.

As a poet, my focus has been predominately page-to-stage work. As a playwright, I tend to veer towards the experimental. I create video poems, dance poems, and verse plays, while also writing more traditional page-based poetry. I like to cross and sometimes dismantle genres and forms. Sometimes I like to write more traditional forms too. I also write micro-essays and creative non-fiction narratives that often resemble prose poems. 

In almost all of my work, I am interested in the ambiguities of language(s), the transmission of memory, both cultural and personal, as well as the concept of time and its interconnections to environment and place.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFO:

Autumn Widdoes is a poet, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, editor, and producer. Her work moves between page, stage, and screen: video poems, verse plays, dance poems, and micro-essays alongside more traditional forms. She is interested in crossing and sometimes dismantling genres, though she is equally at home working within them. In almost all of her work, she is drawn to the ambiguities of language, the transmission of cultural and personal memory, and the relationship between time, environment, and place.

She is the co-founder and artistic director of TASK 沖縄, a performance collective based in Okinawa, Japan, and the founder of the literary and performance series New News. Her work has been presented at Dixon Place, the Brick Theater, Bowery Poetry Club, the Poetry Cafe of the Poetry Society in London, and the Tampa Museum of Art, among other venues. She served as Managing Editor of Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics from 2016 to 2018 and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Autumn currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her bilingual poetry chapbook In Praise of Shadows, a renga sequence based on a series of dance videos and co-written with Japanese poet and dancer Sakurako Yamashita, is forthcoming. She is also at work on a trilogy of plays set in Las Vegas, a screenplay about the March 2011 Tōhoku tsunami, and an experimental hybrid manuscript. She writes the Substack newsletter Wunderkammer.