Category: 2022

Polly Atkin is a poet and nonfiction writer, living in the English Lake District. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by Much With Body (Seren, 2021), supported a 2020 Northern Writers Award. She has also published three pamphlets: bone song (Aussteiger, 2008), Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) and With Invisible Rain… Continue reading Polly Atkin

Yomi is an award-winning Nigerian British writer. He is a recipient of the Jerwood Compton Poetry fellowship 2019 and was shortlisted for The Brunel International African Poetry Prize 2021. Yomi has been published in magazines such as The Poetry Review, Rialto Magazine, Bath Magg and Magma. He is a performer, facilitator, trustee, member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and a Complete Works Alumni.… Continue reading Yomi Sode

Jo Clement is a writer, editor, and educator.  Jo holds a practice-led Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Newcastle University and was awarded an inaugural AHRC Northern Bridge scholarship. She is currently a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Northumbria University (Leverhulme 2021-2022). In 2012 she received a Northern Writers’ Award (New Writing North) selected by Paul… Continue reading Jo Clement

John Agard was born in Georgetown, Guyana. His love of language began in school where his favourite subjects were English, French and Latin. His collections include Half Caste (2005), We Brits (2006) Clever Backbone (2009), Alternative Anthem (2009) Travel Light Travel Dark (2013), Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (2016) and The Coming of the Little… Continue reading John Agard

Grace Nichols was born and brought up in Guyana. After working there as a teacher and journalist, she came to Britain in 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published many books of poetry for both adults and children, including the bestselling, The Fat Black… Continue reading Grace Nichols

Stand-up poet and lo-fi theatremaker Jonny Fluffypunk has been dragging his art around the UK and occasionally beyond for over 20 years, deafly fusing bittersweet autobiography, disillusionment and wonder into an act that has established him as a firm favourite at gigs, festivals and housing benefit offices everywhere. He has two volumes of poems, micro-fictions… Continue reading Johnny Fluffypunk

Helen Bowell is London-based poet, producer and arts administrator. She is an Education Officer at The Poetry Society, and runs its Young Poets Network and Poets in Schools programmes. She is also a co-director of Dead [Women] Poets Society, a live literature organisation that ‘resurrects’ women poets of the past. Helen is a Ledbury Poetry… Continue reading Helen Bowell

John Challis is a poet, researcher and teacher living in the North East. His debut collection of poems The Resurrectionists was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2021. Until recently, he was writer-in-residence at the National Trust’s Seaton Delaval Hall, where he produced Hallsong, a series of poems published as a pamphlet and made into a film. He… Continue reading John Challis

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. He lives in Vancouver, where he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. His books are THIS WOUND IS A WORLD, winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, NDN COPING MECHANISMS, longlisted for Canada Reads… Continue reading Billy-Ray Belcourt