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Jo Bell is a poet working across the UK. For many years she was an archaeologist, she is now the Director of National Poetry Day. She has taken part in many commissions and residencies, manages projects, programmes festivals and events, including Ledbury Poetry Festival 2011. She edits books, journals and ezines, runs workshops and residential breaks for writers across the UK and in France and is running an online course for The Poetry School in the Autumn called Excavations. She speaks to us here about how she does it all. 

Michael Laskey is a full time freelance poet, editor, and tutor who founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1989 and directed it through its first decade. He 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. His first two collections were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations: Thinking of Happiness and The Tightrope Wedding, which was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Michael's day-long Poetry School workshop 'The Poem as Time Machine', looks at how poems can instantaneously take us out of the here and now, and transport us to any time, any place; a day building on the close reading of exemplary contemporary poems to generate lots and lots of new writing.

The Debris Field is a new multi-media production exploring the sinking of the Titanic, written and performed by poets and poetry school tutors Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe being shown at the BFI on the 14th April. The evocative poetic text is accompanied by original music from Oli Barrett of Bleeding Heart Narrative, and film by Jack Wake-Walker. The poets talk here about the inspiration behind their writing, lost manuscripts and uncovered relationships with the ship.

Seni Seneviratne is a poet, creative artist and qualified psychotherapist. Her poetry collection, Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin (Peepal Tree Press 2007) has been described as “a virtual master class between covers.” Her work was showcased in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word in 2010. She has been a Poetry School student for some time, and is currently anticipating the release of her Second collection The Heart of It. here, she chats to us about her new collection and being mentored by Mimi Khalvati.