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Merry Christmas everyone!

Malika Booker is a British writer and multidisciplinary artist of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and journals including Wasafiri, The Penguin Anthology of New Black Writing, and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). Her CV is a flurrey of writerly activity, and we're lucky enough to have her teaching for us in the Spring Term on a course 'Mapping Poetries', the idea for which actually came out of a Poetry School workshop that Malika took as a student. Here, she talks to us about 'Malika's Kitchen', geographical hybrids and her next collection.

It was only after we booked Chris McCabe for his new course 'The Plural Experiment', that we found out that his poetry was actually pretty 'experimental'. We should have guessed from the title really. Anyway, we thought we'd try and see how experimental he really is by giving him an unrelated task whilst at the same time ripping off the Metro. We asked him questions, to which he was only allowed to answer in 140 characters. He passed our experimental test, and he also gave us a poem! To book on to his course, which focuses on the any number of poetic tropes bordering the norm: the tradition of experimentation, Fluxus, Concrete poetry, Projective Verse, randomness, using the syllable, simultaneity etc, click here.

We talked to Rachael Boast about the Book of Job, the attention on her first collection, and the hugeness of the universe. Sidereal, Boast's first collection, has won the Forward Prize for best first collection, shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection prize, and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

Photograph by Jonathan Boast

We decided that here at the Poetry School, we read too much poetry not to share it with everyone. So we're starting a poem of the week, each week relating to a certain theme, and we're going to be asking you guys to give us your favourite poems on that theme too!

This week we struggled to decide on our favourite animal poem, in aid of a course we're hosting called Zero at the Bone: Poems about Animals.