Denise Riley’s books are War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983), ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History (1988), The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005) and Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012). Her poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair; 1996), Selected Poems (2000, 2019), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 (with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine; 2017), Lurex (2022).

She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia where for many years she taught writing, and the history of ideas. She has been Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery, London, and has lectured at many American and European universities. Her work has been variously shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot, Griffin International, Derek Walcott, and Costa prizes, and she's received Cholmondely, Forward, and Roehampton awards.