Emily Mercer, Editor and Publishing Director
Emily Mercer is Wasafiri‘s Editor and Publishing Director. Having worked at Wasafiri since 2015, and previously having roles as Assistant and then Deputy Editor, they have expertise across our academic and creative work. They maintain a particular interest in creative/critical work, poetry, and global queer writing. Emily’s focus is often on Wasafiri as a place for discovering and nurturing nascent talent, and they especially enjoy working with writers as their careers develop.
Sana Goyal, Deputy and Reviews Editor
Sana Goyal is Wasafiri’s Deputy and Reviews Editor. She was formerly Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press, Marketing and Outreach Officer at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, and Digital Editor at Wasafiri. She has a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, TLS, Poetry London, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She lives between Birmingham and Bombay.
Elizabeth Robertson, Administration and Programmes Manager
Elizabeth Robertson is Wasafiri‘s Administration and Programmes Manager. She has a background working in arts organisations focusing on new writing, project management, and live literature events. For over a decade, she has worked in various roles in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, where she also completed her PhD on themes of family, history and memory in the work of writer-director Stephen Poliakoff. She continues to research late twentieth and twenty-first century literature, drama, and culture.
elizabeth.robertson@qmul.ac.uk
Vamika Sinha, Digital Co-ordinator
Vamika Sinha is an arts and culture writer from India and Botswana, previously based in the UAE. She is the co-founder of Postscript Magazine and a Senior Editor at the South Asian Avant-Garde Anthology, and has written for publications like Aesthetica, Canvas Magazine, and The National, among others. She is currently pursuing an MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London, where her research interests include cosmopolitanism, postcolonial feminism, and the diasporic novel and its relationship to the nation-state.
Leon Wainwright, Art Editor
Leon Wainwright is Wasafiri‘s Art Editor. He is Professor and Head of Art History at The Open University. Along with a range of edited and co-edited books on modern and contemporary art and aesthetics, museums and curating, cultural policy and anthropology, he is the author of Phenomenal Difference: A Philosophy of Black British Art (Liverpool University Press, 2017) and Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press, 2011). He is a former long-standing member of the editorial board of the journal Third Text, and founding editor of the Open Arts Journal. In 2013 he became a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in the History of Art.