Tessa McWatt

Project Co-Director & Editor – CityLife Co-Founder

Tessa McWatt is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, and the OCM Bocas Prize.   She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018 for her first non-fiction book, Shame On Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging,which won the 2020 Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize 2020. She co-edited, with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Her latest novel, The Snow Line, was shortlisted for the Volcano Prize. She is also a librettist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Stephen Maddison

Project Co-Director & Editor – CityLife Co-Founder

Stephen Maddison is Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science, and Professor of Cultural Studies, at the University of Brighton, where he’s worked since 2019. Before that he worked at the University of East London for over twenty years, latterly as Director of Research for the College of Arts, Technology and Innovation. Stephen has an international reputation for his research in queer studies, pornography, embodiment and cultural politics, which has appeared in major journals and collections. He is also a musician, composer and potter.

Previous Team Members

Sam Dodd

Project Manager & Editor – CityLife Co-Founder

A graduate of Creative Writing at UEL and City, University of London’s MSc Library Science programme, Sam has been awarded five awards for her research and contributions to academic and East London communities. She is a community engagement specialist working across the areas of oral history, local history, and underrepresented stories. Sam co-founded CityLife, built the administrative systems, contributed to research design and field work across our multiple phases; managed project development, writer training, recruitment and management, and co-developed the ethical framework we use to train them; led on participant safeguarding and effective collaboration with our community partner organisations; led on field research including sourcing information on marginalised groups and their support services and networks; and established our network of partners for the project that included centres and establishments such as Toynbee Hall, Age UK, Aging Well Dagenham, Pepper Pot Day Centre, Cody Dock and Stones End Day Centre. She also coordinated the editing and production of ca.100 stories from the communities we worked in, and was co-editor of our two print publications. She is a literature charity administrator, writer, editor, writing mentor specialising in marginalised voices, researcher, and a Trustee at Spread the Word writer development agency. www.samdodd.co.uk

Erica Masserano

Researcher & Editor

Erica Masserano holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies from the University of East London, and is the recipient of a Stuart Hall Foundation scholarship. She is a freelance researcher, editor and translator in journalism, academia and multimedia. Her background includes cultural studies, narrative research and working with marginalised populations. She is the Life Writing facilitator at OLIve, a course for students with a refugee background wishing to study in the UK. Erica was a CityLife researcher since 2017 and editor since 2019.