[5] She studied with poet Sharon Olds and fiction writers Paule Marshall and Mary Gaitskill in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University.
[6] Bishop's books include a novel, The River's Song (2007), two collections of poems, Fauna (2006) and Snapshots from Istanbul (2009), a 2007 art book entitled Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write: 3 Three Jamaican Artists (which features the work of Earl McKenzie and Ralph Thompson, as well as her own work), and The Gymnast and Other Positions (2015), a collection of short stories, essays and interviews.
Though Bishop treats primarily with issues of womanhood (particularly Caribbean femininity) she also skilfully captures these experiences with fresh masculine eyes.
[12][13] Her 2021 book The Gift of Music and Song collects together interviews with Jamaican women writers (Jean D'Costa, Hazel Campbell, Velma Pollard, Christine Craig, Marcia Douglas and Ann-Margaret Lim) originally published in the Jamaica Observer.
[14] In 2000, Bishop founded Calabash, an online international literary journal with a strong visual arts component, "dedicated to publishing works encompassing, but not limited to, the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean... presenting the arts and letters of those communities that have long been under-represented within the creative discourse of the region, among them: Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles, Maroon societies, and the Asian and Amerindian societies of the region.
[1][17] As a visual artist, she has shown her work at exhibitions internationally, including in Europe, North Africa, the United States and Jamaica.
Bishop's recent work consists of brightly coloured bone China plates used symbolically in Caribbean homes and explores how they hid the violent legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world.