Tutor Academy is a Poetry School initiative to allow poets to develop their teaching skills in a live class setting.  Click the link on the right for details of the current poets involved. 

Gillian Allnutt has published 7 major poetry collections: Spitting the Pips Out (1981); Beginning the Avocado (1987); Blackthorn (1994); Nantucket and the Angel (1997); Lintel (2001); Sojourner (2004); and How The Bicycle Shone: New and Selected Poems (2007). Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is also the co-editor of The New British Poetry, 1968-1988 (1988) and is the author of Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (1991).

A Royal Literary Fund Fellow from 2001-2003, Gillian Allnutt teaches Creative Writing, currently at Newcastle University. She lives in Co. Durham.

 

Charles Bainbridge reviews regularly for the Guardian, mostly poetry; and co-edits the poetry magazine Angel Exhaust. He has published translations and adaptations of the French poet Philippe Soupault in various magazines and pamphlets and has performed them at Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry.

Simon Barraclough is originally from Yorkshire but has lived in London since 1996. He won the poetry section of the London Writers' Prize in 2000 and his 2008 debut Los Alamos Mon Amour was a finalist for Best First Collection in the Forward Prizes. A 'mini-book' of commissioned poems, Bonjour Tetris came out in 2010 and his second full collection, Neptune Blue is due from Salt in July 2011. He recently curated Psycho Poetica, a poetry event in collaboration with the BFI, which invited contemporary poets to respond creatively to sections of the film Psycho.

 

For many years an archaeologist, Jo Bell became a ‘poetry professional’ some years ago.  She also works freelance.  From 2013 Jo Bell will be running a small poetry press with Martin Malone.

She writes poems, including commissions and residencies.  She performs her work, often making stage pieces with other writers like Riverlands, with Jo Blake Cave – or Fourpenny Circus which was nominated for a Ted Hughes Award. Jo Bell also manages projects, the largest of which is National Poetry Day. She programs festivals and events, including the Ledbury Poetry Festival 2011 with Jonathan Davidson.  She edits books, journals and e-zines including Word Gumbo, where she is poetry editor.  She runs workshops and residential breaks for writers across the UK and in France. She writes articles for publications including Magma and non-poetry titles like Country Walking and Heritage magazines.

 

Creative collaborations include work on the Companion Stones project, filmpoems with Alastair Cook, live poetry shows, and a new book-length sequence with Martin Malone. She is a former Cheshire Poet Laureate and my play First Person was performed at the Chester Literature Festival.

 

http://belljarblog.wordpress.com/

 

Linda Black was recipient of the 2004/5 Poetry School Scholarship and winner of the 2006 New Writing Ventures Poetry Award. The beating of wings (Hearing Eye, 2006) was the PBS Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2007 when she also received an Arts Council Writer's Award. Her work has been anthologised in this little stretch of life (Hearing Eye/The Poetry School 2006), I am Twenty People! (Enitharmon, 2007) and The Line Is Not For Turning, An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (Cinnamon Press Sept 2011) Her collections of prose poetry areInventory and Root, (Shearsman 2008 &2011) and the recently published The Son of a Shoemaker (Hearing Eye 2012), consisting of collaged prose poems and the author’s pen and ink illustrations. She is a reader for The Literacy Consultancy and an editor of Long Poem Magazine www.longpoemmagazine.org.uk

 

Malika Booker is a writer, spoken word and multidisciplinary artist, whose work spans literature, education and cross-arts. She has appeared world-wide both independently and with the British Council. She was one of the touring poets with Bittersweet in 1999/2000 and since has featured in the spoken word project, Modern Love, and in Kin at the Barbican in 2004 - a show incorporating words, music and visuals. She was commissioned to co-produce a poetry film to commemorate the Royal Festival Hall's 50th Birthday Celebrations in Spring 2001. Her first musical play, Catwalk, commissioned by NITRO, ran at the Tricycle Theatre in June 2001 and had a successful UK tour. 

She was Hampton Court Palace writer in residence in 2004, and is now a commissioned writer for Croydon Museum. In 2005 she undertook a two-month writer fellowship in Delhi, to work on her first novel.  

She is an experienced creative writing course leader and has run courses for various organisations including The Arvon Foundation, National Theatre and the Young Vic. She worked with young people for the Inner-London Teenager Poetry Slam in 2003 and 2004, which resulted in two collections of their writing, Where I'm From, Where I'm Going and The Way We See It, The Way It Is. 

Malika Booker also jointly runs 'Malika's Kitchen', a writers' collective based in London and Chicago. Her latest play, Unplanned, opened in Spring 2007, with a run at Battersea Arts Centre. Her book, Breadfruit, was also published in 2007. 

Born in Mill Hill, North London,Carole Bremson was auditioned by her dog and failed, barking disapproval at her Titania at the age of nine. This didn’t deter her from adapting Mary Poppins, making her way through Hermia, Ophelia and Jean Brodie before attending The New College of Speech and Drama in London. She danced in St. Andrews, performed at midnight at The Edinburgh Festival and was cast as Helena on a tour of the USA, reinforcing a growing addiction to theatre.

Since graduating, Carole has worked as an actor, director and teacher, most notably adapting Shakespeare for Theatre in Education companies in London and running Shakespeare workshops in Paris, Dublin and Geneva.

Theatre credits include: Helen, A Taste of Honey; Elisabeth, The Lady From Dubuque [Lewes Live Season}. Helena, A Midsummer Night's Dream [USA];National tours of Good Grief; Romeo and Juliet; Confusions; Hot Toddy [Hebrides]. For Theatre Factory: Sophia/Donna Julia in One Fatal Swoon [Jermyn Street] – a double-bill ofLove and Friendship by Jane Austen and Canto One: Don Juan by Lord Byron which she also adapted; Betty inThe New Life; Sandra in Paper Towers as well as numerous Shakespeare workshops in Paris, London, Dublin and Geneva.

Film credits: Quadrophenia; Someone Else's War; World's Apart; The Tempest.

Directing credits include: The Merchant of Venice; Miss Julie; Waiting For Godot; Everyman; Murder In the Cathedral; The Seagull and The Chnagleing. She has also directed over 20 adaptations/compilations including:Love is Not Love; Perfect Shadows; Human Voices Wake Us.

Andy Brown is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at Exeter University. A former Arvon Foundation centre Director, a musician and an ecologist, his latest books of poetry are GOOSE MUSIC (with John Burnside, SALT, 2008), THE STORM BERM (tall-lighthouse, 2007) and FALL OF THE REBEL ANGELS: Poems 1996-2006 (SALT, 2006). His work is intensely lyrical and driven by a fascination for natural ecology, as well as a passion for formal experimentation. He also writes criticism from an environmental perspective and is passionate about the natural world, especially the sea and birds (sometimes even at the same time). He has also edited several books whose concern is to examine the false divides that exist in poetry today between 'traditional' and 'innovative' poets

Nancy Campbell is a poet and printmaker. She apprenticed as a letterpress printer and bookbinder with master craftsmen in New York and the Canadian Rockies. She has worked in printmaking studios, represented artists’ books for the antiquarian book trade and produced critical writing on the genre. Nancy has published several solo and collaborative book projects including Boat Trip (2007), After Light (2009) and Dinner and a Rose (2010). Her works are held in many international collections.

Nancy is currently working on How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic. This portfolio of prints and poems was begun during a residency at Upernavik Museum in the Arctic last winter, funded by Arts Council England.

Nancy Campbell’s blog

 

Her poems have been anthologised in Identity Parade, edited by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe, 2010), Infinite Difference, edited by Carrie Etter (Shearsman, 2010) and many previous anthologies. Poetry Daily featured 'Experience' as Poem of the Day on August 26th 2008.

Her pamphlet Glass Harmonica appeared from Flarestack in 2003 and her first full collection, Stretch of Closures, from Shearsman in 2007 was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Best First Collection prize. Claire's second collection, The Clockwork Gift, appeared in February 2009. A pamphlet, Mollicle, appeared from Nine Arches in October 2010 and another, Incense, has just been published by Flarestack Poets.

Claire Crowther was poet in residence during 2008 at Dorich House, Kingston on Thames, a museum dedicated to the life and work of sculptor Dora Gordine. Claire gave a reading and ran two workshops at the major retrospective of Dora Gordine’s work held at Dorich House in March 2009.

http://www.clairecrowther.co.uk/

Nick Currie (born 11 February 1960 in Paisley, Scotland) is a songwriter, blogger and former journalist for Wired.

For more than twenty-five years he has been releasing, to marginal commercial and critical success, albums on labels in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan. He has written for Wired, Vice, Index Magazine, AIGA Voice, 032c and Design Observer.

James Davies is author of Plants, Acronyms and The Manual Handling Process. He works as editor of if p then q and was formerly editor of the cult poetry object Matchbox. He collaborates with photographer Simon Taylor as Joy as Tiresome Vandalism. In this guise they have two collections, most recently Absolute Elsewhere. In addition he is one of the organisers of The Other Room poetry night and website.

Greg Delanty was born in Cork, Ireland in 1958, and now lives for most of the year in America, where he teaches at St Michael's College, Vermont. His earlier books include Cast in the Fire (1986), Southward (1992), American Wake (1995) and - available from OxfordPoets - The Hellbox (1998). He was awarded the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry award in 1996 and won the National Poetry Competition in 1999.

His book The Ship of Birth (Carcanet, 2003) records a father's responses in the time immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a Ship of Death, so this Ship of Birth contains what is significant to the child: the parents' wonder and trepidation, the nature of the soul, the child's future growth. The poems draw on a rich inheritance from the different worlds that Delanty moves among: Ireland and America, Gaelic and English, traditional verse forms and modern colloquial, to evoke the subtle interconnections of past and future, people and places. Greg Delanty acknowledges the dark and difficult world that the child is entering, while affirming the sustaining continuity of life.

 

Isobel Dixon was born in Umtata, South Africa, grew up in the Karoo region and studied both in Stellenbosch and Edinburgh. She has Masters degrees in English Literature and in Applied Linguistics. She now lives in Cambridge and works in London as a literary agent.

Her latest poetry collection A Fold in the Map was published in 2008. Her work has been widely published in South Africa, as well as further afield, making a name for herself on the international scene. 

She won the Oxfam Poems for a Better Future competition in 2004 and was placed second in the Ilkley Poetry Competition in 2007. Her poems appear on Clive James' guest poets’ site (www.clivejames.com)  and on Poetry International (www.poetryinternational.org). In 2007 she was commissioned by the British Film Institute, along with nine other poets, to write poems based on the ‘Essentially British’ collection in the BFI’s Mediateque archive on the South Bank. Together with a group of UK-based poets she has produced two joint pamphlets, Unfold (2002) and Ask for It by Name (2008).

http://literature.britishcouncil.org

Tim Dooley has taught English in and near London since 1974 and has been publishing poems for about the same time. He edited two editions of a small magazine called Green Lines, and later reviewed poetry regularly for the TLS. He has been an active member of two influential writers’ workshops and worked as a creative writing tutor for Arvon, and Writers’ Inc.   His first collection The Interrupted Dream was published by Anvil in 1985. This was followed by two smaller collections, The Secret Ministry (2001) and Tenderness (2004), both winners in the Poetry Business pamphlet competition. Tenderness was also a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice.

He won the Sheffield Thursday poetry prize in 1995 and the Blue Nose Poet-of-the –Year Competition in 2001. He read English at Oxford and, much later, completed a research MA with the Open University on the poetry of Clough. He is Head of English and Film Studies at Rickmansworth School, Hertfordshire, is married and has two grown up sons.

http://www.saltpublishing.com

Tim Dooley has taught English in and near London since 1974 and has been publishing poems for about the same time. He edited two editions of a small magazine called Green Lines, and later reviewed poetry regularly for the TLS. He has been an active member of two influential writers’ workshops and worked as a creative writing tutor for Arvon, and Writers’ Inc.  His first collection The Interrupted Dream was published by Anvil in 1985. This was followed by two smaller collections, The Secret Ministry (2001) and Tenderness (2004), both winners in the Poetry Business pamphlet competition. Tenderness was also a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice.

He won the Sheffield Thursday poetry prize in 1995 and the Blue Nose Poet-of-the –Year Competition in 2001. He read English at Oxford and, much later, completed a research MA with the Open University on the poetry of Clough. He is Head of English and Film Studies at Rickmansworth School, Hertfordshire, is married and has two grown up sons.

http://www.saltpublishing.com/

Jane Draycott is a UK-based poet with a particular interest in sound art and collaborative work. Her latest collection Over was published in April by Carcanet/OxfordPoets and is currently shortlisted for the 2009 T S Eliot Prize. Nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Poetry, her first two full collections Prince Rupert's Drop and The Night Tree (Carcanet/Oxford) were both Poetry Society Recommendations. Other collections include, from Two Rivers Press, Christina the Astonishing (with Peter Hay and Lesley Saunders) and Tideway, a long sequence of poems about London's working river (with paintings by Peter Hay) written while poet-in-residence at the River & Rowing Museum.

Her audio work with Elizabeth James has won several awards including BBC Radio 3 Poem-for-Radio and a London Sound Art Award. Winner of the Keats Shelley Poetry Prize in 2002 and nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets in 2004, she was a Stephen Spender Prize-winner in 2008 and teaches on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.

Her contemporary version of the medieval dream-vision Pearl is forthcoming in 2010 from Carcanet/OxfordPoets and is supported by Arts Council England South East.

I've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact 'The Night Tree' is the finest collection I've read for ages. - David Morley, The Guardian

Those who enjoyed Jane Draycott's 'Tideway' poems...will know how well she evokes the otherness of the underwater river-world... and it is in this sense that the word 'quiet' should be applied to the chords and modulations of Draycott's eerie and beautiful poems. She listens, and therefore so do we. - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian

Sasha Dugdale was born in Sussex. Between 1995 and 2000 she worked for the British Council in Russia, where she set up the Russian New Writing Project with the Royal Court Theatre. She currently works as a translator and consultant for the Royal Court and other theatre companies. Many of her translations have been staged, one of which, Plasticine by Vassily Sigarev, won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. She has published two collections of translations of Russian poetry and, with Carcanet, three collections of her own poetry,Notebook (2003), The Estate (2007) and Red House (2011). In 2003 she received an Eric Gregory Award. 

http://www.carcanet.co.uk/

 

 

Inua Ellams is a poet, a writer, teacher and performer.

He has facilitated and taught on workshops and extended projects in a number of bodies across London including Primary and Secondary Schools, Theatres and Ideas Stores. He has performed in a growing list of venues and theatres -The Albany & Stratford Theatre Royal - London, The Drum - Birmingham, The Tobacco Factory - Bristol. He has guest performed at The Glastonbury Music, The Latitude Festival, Royal Festival Hall and was commissioned by the BBC's Politics Show to write about the African Diaspora, and was featured on the show reading the commissioned work. He was the 2005 Farrago New Year Poetry Slam Champion and also London Slam Central's first Poetry Slam Champion, and on national poetry day 2007 was featured on the Times Online.

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published poems internationally in such journals as The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The Rialto, Shearsman, and The Times Literary Supplement, and one collection, The Tethers, awarded the London Festival Fringe Best New Poetry Award 2010. She also edited the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, and her pamphlet, The Son, composed largely of prose poems, was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.  A senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, Etter reviews for The Guardian, the TLS, and various literary journals.

Helen Farish was born in Cumbria in 1962, where she now lives. She has been a Fellow at Hawthornden International Centre for Writers and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust (2004-5). She has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Sewanee University, Tennessee, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Hampshire. She lectures fulltime at Lancaster University in the department of English and Creative Writing. 

In 2005 Intimates won her the Forward Prize for best first collection and was also short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize. 

http://www.poetryarchive.org/

Graham Fawcett is a poetry teacher, and a writer and broadcaster on literature and music. Radio programmes include a play, a verse translation of Dante's La Vita Nuova, and features on The Divine Comedy, the Kalevala, Berio and Sanguineti, Venice, Pastoral Poetry, the teaching of creative writing in the US, and Chekhov. He lectures on poetry in Britain, Italy and Spain, translates from Italian and French, and has taught translation at Goldsmiths College for many years. He was co-editor of The Poetry School's second anthology, Entering the Tapestry (Enitharmon, 2003) and is President of the T S Eliot ( UK) Society.

Martin Figura was born in Liverpool in 1956 and works part-time at the Writers’ Centre, >  He is also  a photographer, and a member of the poetry ensemble The Joy of 6. He’s taught poetry, photography and performance to students from reception classes, MA Groups, support groups, prisoners, excluded pupils and all sorts of other people.  A spoken word version of his new collection Whistle (Arrowhead Press, 2010) was produced by Apples and Snakes and began touring in 2010.  Martin Figura's show Whistle received major Arts Council Lottery Fund Award the same year and was shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.  Nasty Little Press published a pamphlet of his amusing poems in November 2010 entitled Boring the Arse Off Young People.  He is Chair of the Café Writers Live Literature organisation in Norwich. His poem ‘Victor’ won the Poetry Society’s 2010 Hamish Canham Prize.  

http://peonymoon.wordpress.com/

http://www.martinfigura.co.uk/

LINDA FRANCE's five poetry collections include The Simultaneous Dress (2002) and The Toast of the Kit Cat Club (2005), a biography in verse of the 18th century traveller and writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She also edited Sixty Women Poets (Bloodaxe 1993, PBS Special Commendation). Linda has a particular interest in cross-arts collaborations and has worked with visual artists and musicians on various projects. Her own writing reflects this in its concern with risk, a fascination with form and play.

Annie Freud was born in London in 1948. She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, maternal grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great grand daughter of Sigmund Freud. Her parents separated when she was four, and she lived with both sets of grandparents; London, in term-time and on the Suffolk coast in the holidays until her mother remarried the economist Wynne Godley. She saw her father regularly throughout her childhood and he painted many portraits of her. They often dined in the company of artists, including Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach.

Freud was educated at the Lycee Francais de Londres and then studied English and European Literature at Warwick University. Since 1975, she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer, exhibiting work and undertaking commissions from people such as Anthony D'Offay, Jon Snow and Graham Norton. In comparing the making of her poems to the making of her visual art, Freud writes "I think it is the process of dredging, choosing, selecting and rejecting what material is there that is so exciting. Even if I eventually chuck most of it out as unnecessary soft furnishing, that's how I often discover what my subject matter might be."

She didn't begin writing poetry till the late 1990's. Seeing Anne Carson read at Poetry International was an awakening for Freud, as she describes being "electrified by [Carson's] grief. Here was something grand, disturbing, like a horse rearing up on its hind legs in protest." When she did start writing, she enjoyed reading to an audience and attending poetry readings for a number of years and in 2006, Donut Press offered to publish her pamphlet A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose. Her first full collection from Picador appeared shortly afterwards: The Best Man Who Ever Was was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2007, and went on to receive the Glen Dimplex New Writers' Award (Poetry) in the same year.

Freud has been described as a poet who writes with "real gusto". A Guardian review talks about the "obvious delight' that she takes in language, describing The Best Man That Ever Was as a "magpie-like collection of odd and beautiful words and phrases". Freud's poems are chaotic, hectic and witty; are a romp through London, its melancholy and beauty; are a sumptuous tumble through love, appetites and desire. In the filmic 'Interlude for Xylophone, Banjo and Trumpet', our hero receives a phone call in the first stanza which sets him off on a vaguely amphibrachic walk, taking in the noise and the bustle of the city, ending with an unsatisfactory bowl of custard in a cafe served by an 'adorable waitress'.

John Glenday is the author of three collections. The Apple Ghost won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and Undark was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (both Peterloo Poets). His most recent collection, Grain, was published by Picador in November 2009 and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for Excellence in New Poetry. 

Born in Wales, Kathryn Gray now lives in London. Kathryn received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001, and her debut, The Never-Never, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Kathryn has participated in several leading arts programmes on poetry, including A Poet’s Guide to Britain and The Larkin Tapes, and has collaborated on film poems for BBC Wales, voiced by Matthew Rhys and Eve Myles. Her most recent work is a poetry/print collaboration with artist Mary Modeen, Uncertain Territories, which was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy. Kathryn was editor of Wales’ leading literary quarterly New Welsh Review for three years before becoming the editor of Parthian Books. Kathryn is a director of Literature Wales and a trustee of T? Newydd, the National Writers’ Centre for Wales. 

 

Vona Groarke has published five collections of poetry, most recently Spindrift (Gallery Books, 2009, Wake Forest University Press 2010), which was a PBS recommendation. She teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Eve Grubin’s book of poems Morning Prayer was published by The Sheep Meadow Press, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Pleiades, The New Republic, Poetry Review, Poetry International, and other magazines and journals, including Conjunctions, where a chapbook-size group of poems was introduced by Fanny Howe. Her essays have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (U of CA Press, 2009). She has taught at The New School and the City College of New York and worked as Programs Director at The Poetry Society of America for five years. In addition to teaching at the Poetry School, she teaches at NYU in London, and she is the Poet in Residence at the London School of Jewish Studies. She holds an MA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and writes a regular column for Poetry International.

In 2008, Jen Hadfield became the youngest person to win the TS Eliot Prize with her collection Nigh-No-Place. Judge Tobias Hill celebrated her "sheer joy of poetry", while fellow judge Andrew Motion commented: "she is a remarkably original poet near the beginning of what is obviously going to be a distinguished career."

Click here to hear a BBC recording of Jen reading from her work. Jen Hadfield was born in Cheshire in 1978 to a Canadian mother and British father. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh and went on to earn an MLitt with distinction from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, tutored by Tom Leonard. In 2003 she won an Eric Gregory Award for the then unpublished Almanacs (Bloodaxe 2005). Leonard describes her as: "A quick mind abroad alone in the ever-changing natural landscape. The language country-rooted, specific, of clear observation: a sophisticated, refreshing country brew", and Katy Evans Bush praises poems for having an "atmosphere of being told by campfire in a field overhung with living stars."

 

Helen Ivory was born in Luton in 1969, and lives in Norwich. She has worked in shops, behind bars, on building sites and with several thousand free-range hens. She has studied painting and photography and has a Degree in Cultural Studies from Norwich School of Art. In 1999 she won an Eric Gregory Award. She was awarded an Arts Council writer's bursary in 2005 and is now Academic Director and teacher of Creative Writing for Continuing Education at the University of East Anglia.

 

 

One of the UK's most exciting and innovative voices, poet, novelist, musician and lecturer Anthony Joseph was born in Trinidad and has lived in the UK since 1989. He is the author of four poetry collections, Desafinado, 1994, Teragaton, 1997, Bird Head Son, 2009, Rubber Orchestras 2012, a spoken word CD Liquid Textology: Readings From The African Origins of UFOs and a novel The African Origins of UFOs published by Salt Publishing in November 2006.

In 2004 Joseph was selected by renaissance one, Decibel and the Arts Council of England as one of fifty Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature, appearing in the historic Great Day photo. In 2005 he was selected as the British Council’s first Poet in residence at California State University,Los Angeles. 

Joseph "voodoo punk" band The Spasm Band released their debut album 'Leggo de Lion' (Kindred Spirits) in 2007. Their most recent album is 'Bird Head Son' (Naive/Heavenly Sweetness, 2009)

Joseph currently lectures in creative writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is completing a PhD at Goldsmiths College.

His new album with the Spasm Band 'Rubber Orchestras' was released in September 2011 followed by his new poetry collection of the same title in February 2012 by Salt Publishing.  

 

Stephen Knight was born in Swansea in 1960. He read English at Jesus College, Oxford, after which he studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School to become a freelance director with a particular interest in new writing. He has worked extensively as a creative-writing tutor in schools, colleges, and for the University of Glamorgan and Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 1987 he received an Eric Gregory Award and in 1992 won first prize in the National Poetry Competition. He is the author of three main poetry collections: Flowering Limbs (1993), a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize;  Dream City Cinema(1996), also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; and, for younger readers, Sardines and Other Poems (2004).

Stephen Knight has also published a novel, Mr Schnitzel (2000), which won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 2001. His fiction and poetry reviews appear in the Times Literary Supplement and the Independent on Sunday. He lives in London.

http://literature.britishcouncil.org/

Michael Laskey is a full time freelance poet, editor, and tutor with many years experience of promoting contemporary poetry. He founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1989 and directed it through its first decade. In 2008 he stepped down as Chairman, but continues to be associated with the Festival as an honorary consultant. He also founded the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll with Roy Blackman in 1991 and since Roy's death in 2002 has been editing it with Joanna Cutts. As a poet he has published four collections and three pamphlets ' Cloves of Garlic (1988), which won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, In the Fruit Cage (1997) and Living by the Sea (2007). His first two collections were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations: Thinking of Happiness (Peterloo, 1991) and The Tightrope Wedding (Smith/Doorstop, 1999), which was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Permission to Breathe (Smith/Doorstop, 2004) was followed by The Man Alone: New & Selected Poems (Smith/Doorstop, 2008). In the spring of 2005 he was awarded an Arts Council International Writing Fellowship at the Banff Centre in Canada.

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales's National Poet from 2005-06, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She has published eight books of poetry in Welsh and English.

Her first collection in English, Parables & Faxes (Bloodaxe Books, 1995), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward. Her second. Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe Books, 1998), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry. Sparrow Tree (Bloodaxe 2011) won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award. The BBC made a documentary of Zero Gravity, inspired by her astronaut cousin's voyage to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Gwyneth was part of the Poetry Society's Next Generation promotion.

In 2006 she was Writer in Residence at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University.In 2010 she was given a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award recognizing a body of work and achievement of distinction.She is an Honorary Fellow of Cardiff, Liverpool and Bangor Universities.  In 2011 she was Mary Amelia Cummins Harvey Visiting Fellow Commoner at Girton College, Cambridge.

 

http://www.gwynethlewis.com/

Kate Light is a librettist, lyricist and poet in New York City. She is also a professional violinist and an alumna of the Eastman School of Music, Hunter College, and the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.  Moreover, she  is a professional violinist and a member of the orchestra of the New York City Opera.

Kate's poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Dark Horse, Hudson Review, New York Sun, Washington Post Book World, Feminist Studies, and many other publications, and was featured four times on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Her work is included in the anthologiesThe Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Western Wind, Poetry Daily, and Good Poems for Hard Times (edited by Keillor), among others.

Kate is a 2011-2012 Resident Artist with American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program.

She has written four volumes of poetry, Einstein’s Mozart: Two Geniuses,Gravity’s Dream (Donald Justice Award), Open Slowly, and The Laws of Falling Bodies (Nicholas Roerich Prize, Story Line Press).
She is also known for her lively poetry readings. 

http://www.katelight.com/

 

Roddy Lumsden has published five books of poetry, most recently Third Wish Wasted (Bloodaxe). Originally from St Andrews, he lives in London where he has taught for City University, Morley College, Metropolitan, City Lit and The Poetry School. He has done editing work on several prize-winning poetry collections and is organiser and host of the reading series BroadCast in London. A popular performer of his work, he has read widely in the UK and the US and in Sweden, Ireland and the Philippines. Former Vice Chair of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, he has been shortlisted for the TS  Eliot Prize and several others and was awarded an International Fellowship at the Banff Center in Ontario in 2001. He has also carried out several residency projects, including being poet-in-residence to the music industry and in a five-star hotel and golf resort. He works as a puzzle and quiz writer and popular reference compiler / editor.

A New Yorker now based in London, Kathryn Maris is the author of a poetry collection The Book of Jobs. She has won many awards including a Pushcart Prize and an Academy of American Poets award, and her work has appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Harvard Review, and several anthologies including Women's Work and Dark Matter: Poems of Space. She teaches creative writing and literature and Morley College and Kingston University.

 

Glyn Maxwell read English at Oxford Univercity.  He moved to the USA in 1996 and in 1997 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was Poetry Editor of the New Republic from 2001-2007, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His first book of poetry, Tale of the Mayor's Son, was published in 1990. Out of the Rain (1992) won a Somerset Maugham Award, and Rest for the Wicked (1995) was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Poetry Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. The Breakage (1998), was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and the Forward Poetry Prizes. His early books are collected as The Boys at Twilight, which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as were his two next books, Time's Fool (2000) and The Nerve (2002).  The Nerve also won the 2004 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His work features in The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (1998), The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998), The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999), and Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999).

His latest poetry collection, Hide Now, was published in 2008, and shortlisted for the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2009 Forward Poetry Prize. A Selected Poems - One Thousand Nights and Counting, was published in 2011.

http://literature.britishcouncil.org/glyn-maxwell

John McAuliffe has published two books with The Gallery Press, A Better Life and Next Door. His poems have been published in Best Irish Poems 2008 & 2010, Cork Literary Review, Gallous, Icarus, International Literary Quarterly, The Irish Times, The Meath Anthology, The North,  Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, PN Review, The Spectator, The Stinging Fly, and The Watchful Heart.  In Spring 2010 he was Visiting Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University. 

http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry has featured in a number of magazines including Magma and Poetry Review. His first collection The Hutton Inquiry was published in 2005, his second Zeppelins was recently published by Salt. He has discussed and read his poetry on BBC World Service, featured a poem on the Oxfam CD Lifelines and performs his work regularly. He currently works as Joint Librarian of The Poetry Library and lives in Dagenham with his wife and son.

 

Karen McCarthy Woolf writes poetry, drama and short fiction for print, online, broadcast and live platforms. She is the editor of two critically acclaimed anthologies Bittersweet: Black Women's Contemporary Poetry (The Women's Press) and Kin (Serpent's Tail). She is also an associate editor at the international literary journal Wasafiri, on the editorial board of Magma magazine and reviews for Modern Poetry in Translation.

In 2005 her play Dido, based on the life of a mixed-race girl who grew up in Kenwood House, Hampstead in the 1760s, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She was also writer in residence at the Museum of Garden History and Literature development agency Spread the Word. 

Her poetry chapbook The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2006. She was a runner up in the Cardiff International Poetry Prize with her poem The Wish.  In 2010 a selection of new poetry was published in Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, eds Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra) an anthology that showcased the work of ten new poets selected for the The Complete Works development programme.  

John McCullough's poetry has appeared in publications including The Rialto, The Guardian, Ambit, The London Magazine, Magma, Staple and Chroma. He also teaches creative writing at the University of Sussex and the Open University.

He has a Phd in Shakespeare and Friendship from Sussex and lives in Brighton.

His book The Frost Fairs is published by Salt.

 

 

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield and lives in Cambridge. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse: the shape of every box and a pint for the ghost, which was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her work has appeared in magazines including The Spectator, Poetry Review and The Manhattan Review. She received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2007.

 

Sean O'Brien is a poet, critic, playwright and editor of six award-winning collections, most recently The Drowned Book . His essays The Deregulated Muse (Bloodaxe) and an anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (Picador) appeared in 1998. His plays are published by Methuen and his short stories by Comma Press. He was Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam, where he taught on the MA Writing course from 1998 to 2006, and is now Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Niall O'Sullivan has performed poetry since 1997. His first collection is entitled You're Not Singing Anymore (Waterways, 2004). Niall has hosted the Aromapoetry open mic with Nii Parkes as well as founding and co-hosting New Blood for three years at the Poetry Cafe with James Byrne. Niall hosts London's biggest weekly open mic event, Poetry Unplugged. His second collection, Ventriloquism for Monkeys, was released in the Autumn of 2007.

 

Kathleen Ossip is the author of two books of poems, The Search Engine and The Cold War, and one chapbook, Cinephrastics. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, Fence, The Believer, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School in New York, where she was a founding editor of LIT, and she's the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as grants from Bread Loaf, the Ragdale Foundation, and Yaddo.m

Ruth Padel (b. 1947) has won the National Poetry Competition and written seven collections of poetry, several shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot or Whitbread Prize; written a PhD on Greek tragedy at Oxford University, taught Greek at Oxford, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, London (and opera in Princeton Modern Greek Department).  She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and a great great grand-daughter of Charles Darwin. She is at present a freelance writer, doing features and reviews for many newspapers including The Independent, The Times and New York Times; and broadcasting for BBC Radio 3 and 4.

Her seven collections include Angel (1993), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation;  Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (1998), a Poetry Book Society Choice; Voodoo Shop (2002), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award; The Soho Leopard (2004), a Poetry Book Society Choice shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; and Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009), shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.

She writes prose as well as poetry. "There are few women writing non-fiction today with such a sophisticated understanding of language, nuanced approach to style, and willingness to engage with the big issues, personal and political" (Guardian).  

literature.britishcouncil.org/

www.poetryarchive.org

 

Poet, writer and musician Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990 and his poem 'A Private Bottling' won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition in 1993. He was included on the list of 20 poets chosen for the Poetry Society's 'New Generation Poets' promotion in 1994. In 2002 he was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award.

His first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. God's Gift to Women (1997) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Eyes, adaptations of the work of Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), was published in 1999. He is also editor of 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (1999) and of Last Words: New Poetry for the New Century (1999) with Jo Shapcott. His plays include The Land of Cakes and A'body's Aberdee, both performed by Dundee Repertory Theatre. His latest collection of poems, Landing Light (2003), won both the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award. In 2008, he won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) and was awarded an OBE.

Don Paterson is poetry editor for the London publishers Picador and he reviews for several national newspapers. An accomplished jazz guitarist, he works solo and with the jazz-folk ensemble, Lammas. He lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland.

Sonnets to Orpheus, his version of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus, was published in 2006. His latest books are Best Thoughts, Worst Thoughts: On Art, Sex, Work and Death (2008); and a new poetry collection, Rain (2009), winner of the 2009 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).

Born in Buffalo, New York, Molly Peacock, a poet and a creative non-fiction writer, received a B.A. magna cum laude from Harpur College (Binghamton University, SUNY) and an M.A. with honors from The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University.

She  is the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72 (2010) and six books of poetry, including The Second Blush: Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008);Cornucopia (2002); Original Love (1995); Take Heart (1989); Raw Heaven (1984); and And Live Apart (1980). Among her other works are a memoir called Paradise, Piece By Piece (1998) and How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle (1999). She is the editor of a collection of creative non-fiction, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World (2001) and the co-editor ofPoetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses (1996).She is a President Emerita of the Poetry Society of America.   

Former Poet-in-Residence at the American Poets' Corner (Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York) and former President of thePoetry Society of America, she is currently on the faculty of the Spalding University Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program. She also serves as Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English, published each year byTightrope Books.

A transplanted New Yorker and a dual American-Canadian citizen, she now lives with her husband, James Joyce scholar Michael Groden, in Toronto.

http://www.mollypeacock.org/

http://www.poets.org/

Pascale Petit’s latest collection is What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010), which is shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and a book of the year in The Observer. She trained at the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a visual artist before deciding to concentrate on poetry. Since then she has published five collections, two others of which, The Huntress and The Zoo Father, were also shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and were books of the year in the Times Literary Supplement and the Independent. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected her as one of the Next Generation Poets. Petit is widely travelled, including in Mexico, the Venezuelan Amazon, China and Nepal. She has worked as editor for Poetry London, was a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School and was the Royal Literary Fellow at Middlesex 2007–9. She currently tutors for Arvon, Ty Newydd, The Poetry School, Chateau Ventenac and Tate Modern.

 

 

Formerly Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and more recently RLF Fellow at Westminster University, his poetry performances attract international recognition (for example, with the British Council). Mario has received many awards for his poetry: he is four times winner of the London Writers Competition and recipient of the 2002 Arvon/ Daily Telegraph International Poetry Prize.

He now works as an educator and creative writing tutor for all ages, and as a radio/tv broadcaster. Co-founder of writers inc., Mario teaches widely in adult contexts and in schools, lecturing students at the Imperial War Museum and much in demand as a visiting writer specialising in war poetry and the curriculum.

Mario has published numerous poetry books and pamphlets, including: Shrapnel and Sheets, Bosco, Heavy Water, Half Life, Fearnought (poems for Southwell Workhouse), along with translations of Catullus, Sappho and Montale. Lepidoptera is a hybrid book of long poetry and short prose, while his illustrated collection The Stamina of Sheep (the unique result of an innovative public and educational arts project for Havering, the Thames and Essex) captured the Essex Book Award for Best Fiction Publication (2000-2002). Flowers of Sulphur was published in 2007, and i tulips in 2010. Mario is currently working on several collections, including Monte Cassino.

 

 

Andrew Philip is part of a significant group of younger Scottish poets gaining recognition throughout and beyond the UK. He has published two pamphlets and a full collection of his work, The Ambulance Box (Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry 2010, the Scottish Arts Council first book award 2010 and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2009.

 

About me: I have published three books of poetry, the latest of which 'Look, Clare! Look!' (Bloodaxe, 2005). I have won an Eric Gregory award and was named by the Independent as one of their Top 20 Writers Under 30. My play 'The Weather' (Faber, 2004) was performed at the Royal Court. I have been Managing Editor of The Idler and editor of the poetry journal Reactions, and had journalism published in The Guardian, The Independent, the TES, The Channel 4 Film website, Magma and London Magazine. I have also worked frequently on TV and radio, and my latest documentary 'My Male Muse' (2007) was a Radio 4 Pick of the Year. I teach for Arvon and the City Lit. -As a writer, I am very concerned with the idea of bearing witness to the times in which I live. My work has frequently engaged with contemporary concerns - from our confessional media culture in 'Bedtime' to climate change in 'The Weather' and globalisation in 'Look, Clare! Look!'

Kate Potts was born in South London in 1978, and still lives in London. She worked in music publishing before training as a teacher.  She has an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, London, and has taught in Further and Adult Education for several years. Her poems have appeared in various magazines including Ambit, Magma, Poetry Wales and The Wolf. Her pamphlet Whichever Music (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her work features in the Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century..

In 2009 she received an Arts Council writer’s award and her first collection Pure Hustle was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2011. Kate teaches creative writing and does university outreach work. She is also working towards a PhD on radio poetry.

http://covepark.org/

http://www.tall-lighthouse.co.uk/

'Pure Hustle is a gem of book in which Kate Potts conjures a poetry which astonishes and moves the reader. The texture of her language – its deft and surprising turns, its intense musicality – allows the many voices in these poems to soar. Her curiosity and profound intelligence means that the poems range wonderfully far and wide in setting and subject-matter from the urban clutter of contemporary settings, to modern variations on pastoral, to Penelope weaving, to a beached whale, and more. Kate Potts is a poet whose ear and eye for her work are as close to perfect as can be: Pure Hustle is pure gold' – Jo Shapcott.

 

 

Jacob Sam-La Rose, born in 1976, is a poet, educator, freelance artistic director and editor. As a consultant forcreative writing and literature, he has run workshops and held residencies internationally at hundreds of schools and other institutions. He's also known for youth poetry slam initiatives. 

As a poet,he has read at a wide selection of venues and festivals, including Kiasma (Finland), the Centre of Contemporary Art (Glasgow), London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Aldeburgh Literary Festival, the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers’ Conference (Chicago), the Arts House (Singapore) and The URB Festival (Helsinki). His work has been published in Identity Parade – New British & Irish Poets; Penguin’s Poems For Love; I Have Found A Song; Learn Then Burn: The Ultimate Poetry Guide for the High School or College Classroom; and Michael Rosen’s A-Z: The Best Children’s Poetry from Agard to Zephaniah, among many other anthologies and journals. His pamphlet Communion was a Poetry Book Society selection in 2006, and his new collection Breaking Silence was published in 2011 by Bloodaxe Books.

He has described himself as the product of a post-colonial Caribbean work ethic passed down from his mother, something that has morphed into his own rigorous professional drive. “My work as a poet came to mean more than just being the best writer I could be. For it to exist in the real world, my work has to be bigger than myself, in the same way that so many of my elders worked for the benefit of future generations – and so it extends into changing mainstream attitudes towards poetry, and helping to nurture other emerging poets.” It is this generosity of spirit and collectivist outlook that sets him apart from many other poets and performers – Sam-La Rose is an active, participatory force in the literary world whose dedicated efforts to include young people in the practice and possibilities of poetry have touched many.

His work is grounded in a belief that poetry can be a powerful force within a community, and has united in praise the sometimes divided strands of ‘performance’ and ‘page’ poetry, proving it is possible to combine the immediacy of performance with the rigor of poetry on the page.

http://jacobsamlarose.com

http://www.poetryarchive.org/

Ann Sansom is a poet, playwright and tutor. She has published six collections of poetry; had work published in several Forward/Faber anthologies, Russian Vogue and a range of other publications; and has written and directed plays for stage and radio.

She is presently working with The British Film Institute on a series of commissioned film-related poems and is writing a screenplay for a further series of short films.

Ann is currently a regular tutor for WEA, Poetry Society and Arvon Foundation and has taught at Oxford, Leeds and Sheffield Hallam universities. She regularly works in schools and tutors at school writing residentials, teaching children of all ages and abilities, and has run a weekly writers' workshop at Doncaster YWCA for twenty years.
Ann is also a director of The Poetry Business, which publishes 'The North' magazine and Smith/Doorstop books.

 

Peter Sansom, former Fellow in Creative Writing, Leeds University and Company Poet at both M&S and Prudential. He's a director of the Poetry Business, co-editor of The North and Smith/Doorstop Books. Books include The Last Place On Earth, Carcanet, and Writing Poems, Bloodaxe.

Her writing life, she declares, began with poetry at the age of five.  She adds jokingly that "on a chequered journey I moved on to songwriting, playwriting, screenwriting and stand-up comedy before rediscovering poetry, her first love". She co-organises a monthly reading called The Shuffle at the Poetry Café and was previously on the board of Magma Poetry.  She was resident poet at Good Housekeeping Online where she wrote a monthly column,  won first prize in the London Art Poetry competition judged by Andrew Motion, and first prize in the Ledbury Poetry competition 2007.  Her pamphlet,  Rock'n'Roll Mamma(Flarestack) was followed by a first full collection, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions, developed with the support of the Arts Council of England, was published by Flipped Eye in June 2011.

 

 

http://www.jacqueline.saphra.net/

http://www.saltpublishing.com/

Maggie Sawkins was born in 1953 and spent her childhood in Leigh Park, a large council housing estate north of Portsmouth. She began writing poetry at the age of nine after being inspired by her head teacher. Her first poems were published in Hampshire Poets when she was seventeen. After a series of office jobs, including three years with The Exeter Flying Post, Maggie returned to education and went on to gain an MA with distinction in Creative Writing. For the past twelve years she has taught students with specific learning difficulties at South Downs College near Portsmouth. In 2004 Maggie co-founded the popular Tongues & Grooves Poetry and Music Club in Southsea where she now lives with her husband, younger daughter and a growing menagerie. Flarestack published a pamphlet collection, Charcot’s Pet, in 2003. The Zig Zag Woman is her first full collection.

‘Maggie Sawkins draws brilliantly on extended metaphor and the surreal to explore painful relationships, mental illness and problematic situations. She writes both from personal experience and beyond it. Her inventive and highly individual voice is always authentic. The taut writing carries emotional weight and sends that shiver up my spine which tells me I am reading real poetry. This is a very exciting first collection.’ Myra Schneider   

http://www.tworavenspress.com/

Myra Schneider's recent poetry publications are Multiplying The Moon (Enitharmon 2004), Becoming (Second Light Publications 2007) and Circling The Core (Enitharmon 2008) . Other books include Writing My Way Through Cancer, a journal with poems and therapeutic writing ideas (Jessica Kingsley in 2003). She is co-editor of four anthologies of women's poetry, including Images of Women published by Arrowhead Press/SLN in 2006. Writing Your Self (with John Killick), which has a major focus on poetry, was published by Continuum International in November 2009. She was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2007. Her work is widely published in magazines and anthologies and she much appreciates the support of Les Murray who has published her poems for many years in the Australian cultural magazine Quadrant. Myra is consultant to the nationwide Second Light Network of Women Poets which promotes women’s poetry and offers many opportunities to its members to develop their work. She contributes articles and reviews regularly to ARTEMISpoetry a comprehensive magazine for women’s poetry. Myra is particularly interested in personal poetry and making connections between the inner and outer world, also in narrative poetry. She also writes about the natural world and the environment. She does many one-off workshops all over the country and is fascinated by the writing process.

Seni Seneviratne is a writer, poet, performer, singer and creative artist born and raised in Leeds, Yorkshire and of English and Sri Lankan heritage. Her work as a poet and live artist has been praised particularly for the unique talent of engaging an audience through poetry and song. Her poetry is published in the UK, Denmark, Canada and South Africa.
Seni published her first collection, Wild Cinnamon Winter Skin (Peepal Tree Press) which offered a poetic landscape echoing themes of migration, family, love and loss and reflecting her personal journey as a woman of mixed heritage. One of the poems from this collection was highly commended by the judges in the Forward Poetry Prize 2007. The collection was praised by Professor Ramey (California State University, Los Angeles) as “a virtual master class between covers which represents two decades of commitment to poetic craft…..The poet’s vision is given over with consistent generosity and empathy towards the human spirit, to a glorious populace of individuals… whose lives will be permanently commemorated with respect, dignity and affection through the poems in this collection.”

 

Penelope Shuttle was born in 1947 in Middlesex, and has lived in Falmouth, Cornwall since 1970, a place which often inspires her current work. Her husband, Peter Redgrove, died in 2003, and her latest poetry collection, Redgrove's Wife (2006), is a book of lament and celebration about his life and death, and the loss of her father. Redgrove's Wife was shortlisted for the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).

She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1974, and her first full-length poetry collection was The Orchard Upstairs (1980). This has been followed by seven further collections, including: The Lion from Rio (1986); Taxing the Rain (1992); Building a City for Jamie (1996); and A Leaf Out of His Book (1999). A book of her Selected Poems: 1980-1996, was published in 1998. Three of her collections have been Poetry Book Society Recommendations.

She is also the author of five earlier novels, including All the Usual Hours of Sleeping (1969); and The Mirror of the Giant (1980). With her husband, she published two non-fiction books: The Wise Wound: Eve's Curse and Everywoman (1978), dealing with the psychology and creative aspect of menstruation and its part in redefining the role of women; and its sequel, Alchemy for Women: Personal Transformation Through Dreams and the Female Cycle (1995).

Penelope Shuttle received a Cholmondeley Award in 2007. She reads her poetry throughout the UK, is an experienced poetry tutor, and is currently working on a ninth collection of poetry and a prose memoir.

A writer of prose and drama as well as poetry, Catherine Smith teaches for the University of Sussex, the Arvon Foundation, and runs a creative writing enrichment group for youngsters; unsurprising for a poet whose own writing bustles with people of all kinds. Widely admired, her three poetry collections to date have been shortlisted for several prizes and in 2004, she was named among "the twenty most exciting poets to have published a first collection in the last ten years" as part of the PBS/Guardian's 'Next Generation Poets' promotion. It is Smith's ability to pique and sustain the reader's interest through direct address and, at times, queasy detail, which ensures the success of her work. Take 'How It All Started', the opener on this Archive recording: "Do you know this dream'", the poet queries, before feats of association lead to the potent image of "a soldier's / booted foot lying in a puddle": "how the rest of him wasn't there, just a stump / of bone". Throughout Smith's reading of these edgy, compelling poems, the curious and the disturbing are forever bubbling to the surface.

Much of this lively yet quietly insistent recording draws on Smith's third collection, Lip: a book praised by Daljit Nagra as "funny and intelligent - a unique comic-serious exploration of the conflicts between contemporary mores and physical desires".

Rommi Smith is a poet and playwright. She has written and performed extensively on BBC Radio, featuring on programmes ranging from Poetry Please! to Late Junction, The Verb to Woman's Hour. Rommi works to fuse poetry and music in a variety of contexts, with jazz musicians, writing libretto for opera and lieder. She is currently writing the libretto for a chamber opera and is commissioned to write new poems for The Museum of London and The Olympics. 

Rommi has held numerous international residencies for organisations ranging from the British Council to the BBC. Rommi was Poet in Residence for the Commonwealth Games in Manchester and Poet in Residence for BBC Music Live. In 2007, Rommi was appointed Parliamentary Writer in Residence; the first such appointment in British history. She was invited to be Poet in Residence at Keats’ House, London; former home, now museum celebrating the life of Romantic poet, John Keats. Rommi served as British Council Poet in Residence at California State University in Los Angeles, creating a brand new piece of theatre about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in partnership with English MA students and the University's Jazz Orchestra. 

She teaches creative writing for a wealth of organisations and institutions including Leeds University, International Schools Theatre Association, The ARVON Foundation and the Poetry School. Rommi features in We Are Poets, the award-winning film about the lives of six-young poets, whom she mentored to attend Brave New Voices USA, the biggest slam championships in the world.  

Rommi is delighted to have acted as a consultant/advisor to Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tawakul Karman, during preparations for her speech to Parliament in Autumn 2011. 

Selected Poems from Mornings and Midnights (the chapbook of poems from Rommi's forthcoming full collection) was selected as a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Rommi is honoured to be awarded a prestigious Hedgebrook Fellowship in the United States, where she will complete writing her full collection this year. She is the recipient of the 2012 Elizabeth George Award. 

 

I lecture in creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University and tutor for the Taliesin Trust at Ty Newydd and for The Arvon Foundation. I have published three collections of poetry, most recently Joking Apart (2004, The Collective Press) to excellent reviews. I was Course-Leader for Creative Writing for the Open College of the Arts and an English teacher in several comprehensive schools. I love teaching in a variety of different settings and find that the exchange of views and responses, whether between myself and people approximately my age or between me and teenagers in a school feeds my enthusiasm for writing. I like writing which is honest and, to use Peter Sansom's word 'authentic', writing which is not striving to be 'poetic' but is striving to communicate an experience, thought or feeling through heightened, perfectly-chosen language. My writing is rooted in reality but, I hope, its sequins catch the light.

I was born in Budapest in late 1948 to a Hungarian Jewish father and a Transylvanian Lutheran mother, or so I thought until she died when it turned out she had been Jewish too. Both had had the experiences Jews were subjected to in the war: both survived having discarded their religion so my brother and I were brought up in an entirely secular environment. In 1956 the family left Hungary, like so many other, by crossing the border illegally into Austria and thence coming to England. I was just eight at the time. I went to school in London, then studied painting, working as an artist as well as poet for a number years. The poetry began in my last two years at school. I went through the usual process of rejection and disappointment until, at the age of 30 my first book appeared in 1979 and was joint-winner of the Faber Prize. By that time my writing had undergone various changes and in some respects the poet I was then would still be recognised to be the poet I am now. The major change since then has been my return visits to Hungary since 1984 that, more than anything, altered my perspective on history and the beauty and fragility of life. Or rather, while I was aware of these things before, they now assumed specific shape. The poems became longer, more architectural, more culturally aware, I suppose. I also became more overtly aware of language, its oddity, its incapacity, its odd commonality, the way it both linked and divided people. I had begun the long enterprise of translation, something that still engages me on a daily basis. The otherness of words led me to more experimentation with form but always with a deep awareness that this was no theoretical field but a fully human enterprise, engaged with human acts, human experiences, in a society of human beings, not ideas. The books continued to appear and generally did well, being short-listed for and, occasionally, winning prizes, most notably the T S Eliot Prize for Reel in 2004. Being a productive writer the New and Collected Poems of November 2008 comprises some 450 pages. I have also loved writing for children and working with composers as well as artists, so hop to be able to publish a body of work in those areas.

 

Katharine Towers was born in London in 1961 and read Modern Languages at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She has an MA in Writing from Newcastle University. Her pamphlet 'Slow Time' was published by Mews Press in 2005 and her poems have appeared in publications including Mslexia and The North. She lives in the PeakDistrict with her husband and two daughters.  Katherine Towers has won the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize 2011 for her first collection, The Floating Man.  "In their deft harnessing of the music intrinsic to language (…)Towers's poems are akin to those moments of quiet clarity amid the bustle and blur of daily life." Ben Wilkinson 

http://www.picador.com/

 

 

 

Jeffrey Wainwright's Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994) and Out of the Air (1999) are published by Carcanet Press. His critical writing includes book on the purposes and styles of poetry, Poetry the Basics (2004), Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill, (2006), and he has translated plays by P'guy, Claudel, Corneille and Bernard-Marie Kolt's. His new book of poems, Clarity or Death! will be published by Carcanet in 2008. He lives in Manchester where he teaches English at Manchester Metropolitan University.

 

Karen Whiteson has had poetry published in numerous magazines and anthologies.  She has written libretti for chamber operas  and her radio play was broadcast on Radio 3. These have been published in the Edinburgh Review and on the Ink Sweat & Tears website as well as in anthologies published by Penguin, Aurora Metro and Unthank Books.  She has taught Creative Writing in a wide range of contexts including The Drill Hall, Lauderdale House, The Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins.

http://theoakstudio.com

http://kwhiteson.wix.com/

Born in Norfolk in 1971, Heidi lived in Stirling, Brussels, and Salisbury before returning to Norwich in 2001.Heidi’s day job is as manager of a team of advertising copywriters. She has studied poetry at the UEA, and reads and delivers workshops regularly throughout the UK.

In 2008 she received an Arts Council award to complete her first collection, Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. She was poet-in-residence for the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre in 2008 and 2009. She is currently poet-in-residence for the John Jarrold Printing Museum.

She was short-listed for the Poetry Society Hamish Canham prize 2008 and poems were put forward for the Forward prize for Best Single Poem in 2008 and 2009. She won the Poetry Can Poetry Competition in 2009, was a runner up in the Mslexia Poetry Competition in 2007 and 2008, and joint winner of the Café Writers poetry competition in 2003.

Her work has been used in the Science, Art and Writing initiative to inspire poetry and science discussions with schoolchildren, and she was invited to read at the 2006 British Science Festival. Poems have also been displayed as part of the Salisbury Festival, and been included in the Poems in the Waiting Room initiative.

http://www.heidiwilliamsonpoet.com/

http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/

Cliff Yates is a poet, freelance writer and creative writing tutor. His books include Henry's Clock (Smith Doorstop: winner of the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition), Frank Freeman's Dancing School (Salt Publishing) and Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School (Poetry Society). He has taught in schools and universities, and has run courses and workshops for the Poetry Society, the Arvon Foundation, Ty Newydd, the British Council and the Poetry Business. He holds a PhD in Poetry and Poetics. His students at Maharishi School, where he taught English, were extraordinarily successful at winning poetry competitions. He is the recipient of an Arts Council England Writer's Award. www.cliffyates.co.uk