I am a poet interested in misogyny, queer corporeality and chronic illness.
I regularly explore post-trauma, in particular sexual trauma, gendered violence and the medicalised trauma of chronic illness. I have a BA in Classics from Durham University and am interested in mythmaking as a means of processing traumatic and incomprehensible experiences.
I am writing and researching a book-length work about bats which brings together many of these areas of interest.
My poetry pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, was published in 2021 with ignitionpress, part of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre. Buy a copy here.
I was the 2020 winner of the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, judged by Fiona Benson. Read my winning poem, 'Appetit', here.
I was in the 2022/23 cohort of The London Library's Emerging Writers Programme, and am an alum of the Barbican Young Poets and the Writing Squad.
He Said I Was a Peach
Published in 2021 by ignitionpress
These are breathtaking poems of a strange, deep glamour; their imagery is uncompromising, and their music utterly original. Byford composes on a scale that is entirely her own. She has a preternatural ability to capture other worlds, other Umwelten – Thetis hearing her son’s voice as 'a warm strain / softening the frozen kelp / like piss', or the shuttling dislocations of Arachne – 'weft thin / softning'. These poems return to sites of trauma or eroticism or myth in a way that renders them immediate, dangerous, and unstable; but there is a beautiful act of salvage here. The world is sifted for its stains, blisters and residues, its sensual drives, and the sticky fingers of human longing. Byford is a reckoning, an uncanny and ferocious rising star.
— Fiona Benson
links to other work: