Gregory Woods

Gregory Woods (born in 1953 in Egypt) is a British poet who grew up in Ghana. He is a respected English professor and has been since his first experience in teaching.

Woods began his teaching career at the University of Salerno. Since 1990 he has worked at Nottingham Trent University, where, in 1998, he was appointed Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies, the first such appointment in the United Kingdom. He was awarded a PhD by the University of East Anglia in 1983, and a DLitt in 2006. Woods' main areas of interest are twentieth-century gay and lesbian literature; post-war gay and lesbian film and cultural studies; and the AIDS epidemic. In addition to his poetry collections, he is the author of a number of critical books, including Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998). He has been a member of the board of directors of East Midlands Arts, a regional darts champion and is a Fellow of the English Association.

Woods is cousin to British journalist Justin Webb and his uncle was BBC Writer and actor Peter Woods.

Woods is a technically gifted poet who writes in free verse, syllabics and metre. Thom Gunn wrote of the poems in his first collection: 'I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling... taken together, they constitute a handbook of desire; separately, each is an exquisite insight, rapid and rich. The predominant tone is of a kind of delighted astonishment that mere sensuality can be so meaningful.' Woods' subject matter is by no means limited to gay themes and his work is characterised by classical and literary allusions, a dry cynicism and waspish humour. In the Times Literary Supplement of October 16, 1992, Neil Powell wrote 'The overwhelming impression of We Have the Melon remains that of frankly sexual joyousness matched by serious literary intelligence, a rare combination and a reassuring one.'