“(Poulsons) work has a crystalline quality that is unusual” (OSIRIS. U.S.A.)

“What May Sarton calls ‘the burden of mystery’ requires we speak of that of which we cannot speak. This is no less than a vocation, and Joan Poulson’s work is under that burden of necessity… is rare and worth our attention”

(David Hart)

Joan Poulson is a poet, dramatist, children’s writer and tutor born in Manchester. Her work is represented in 300+ anthologies, her books held in 665 libraries world-wide.

Publications:

earth-being, Below-the Moor Press 1992

Celebration (chn’s), UNICEF 1993

Girls are like Diamonds (chn’s), O.U.P. 1995

Pictures in my Mind (chn’s), Macdonald 1999

earth-being, Flarestack reprint 2000

Dear Ms (chn’s), A & C Black 2001

onetree singing, Blackthorn Books 2001

Sling a Jammy Doughnut (ed. chn’s), Hodder 2002

onetree journal, Flarestack 2010

Non-fiction:

Window on Winwick Hospital, Arts/N.W. Arts 1994

Ladywell Lives Hospital, Arts/N.W. Arts 1996

During the 1980s  Joan had 14 books published on the subject of regional English food & its links with tradition, trained as a ceramicist, worked as scriptwriter for a B.B.C. radio soap, has held several long-term residencies: with a sculptor, modern dance company, musicians, painters & for almost 4 years in hospitals, working with adults with severe mental health issues.

She has read & exhibited her work nationally & internationally: New Mexico; Durham Art Gallery; Oslo; India; California; The South Bank Centre, London; Vermont Studio Center during a two-month scholarship stay (Vermont Fellowship); the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh; the Jeffrye Museum, London; has received bursaries from the Arts Council; twice received the Canadian Sandberg-Livesay Award & received awards from the U.S. National Federation of State Poetry Societies.

Her children’s collection Pictures in my Mind (Macdonald) was shortlisted for the Signal Award.

In 2012 her work for children will be represented on The Poetry Archive.

Claire Trévien is a Franco-British poet residing in the Midlands. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Warwick on the French Revolution. Her writing has been published in a variety of literary magazines including Under The Radar, Poetry Salzburg Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Warwick Review, Nth Position, Fuselit, and on a cake with The Poetry Digest. She is the founder of Sabotage Reviews (http://sabotagereviews.com).

Publications

The Shipwrecked House (Penned in the Margins, 2013).

Low-Tide Lottery (Salt 2011).

Patterns of Decay (Silkworms Ink, 2011).

Anthologies

Lung Jazz: The Oxfam book of Younger British Poets, ed. Todd Swift (Cinnamon Press, Spring 2012)

Birdbook II: Freshwater habitats (Sidekick Books, Spring 2012).

Coin Opera II (Sidekick Books, forthcoming 2012).

Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012).

Pod and More Small Fiction (Leaf Books, 2011).

Dove Release: New Flights and Voices (Worple Press, 2010).

The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Cinnamon Press, 2008).

Outbox and Other Poems (Leaf Books, 2006).

“This is fresh, exuberant, intellectually serious poetry, enriched by a French passport and a French library” — Katy Evans-Bush

“What I never expect, but what I found in Claire Trevien’s work, is a voice already so mature and refined it reads like a previously untranslated classic rather than a debut. These are serious, visually stunning poems of nationality, history and memory, but they’re personal and generous in their wit, as formally innovative as they are endlessly engaged and engaging. Reading them is like spending an hour in the company of someone you secretly admire.” — Luke Kennard

Claire Trévien’s Website

Helen Moore grew up in Seer Green, Bucks, and having lived abroad and in Scotland for several years, has settled in Frome, Somerset.  She studied French and German at Hertford College, Oxford, and then did her Masters in Comparative and General Literature at Edinburgh University.  She has been guest poetry editor of Resurgence Magazine and regularly performs her work at events and conferences around the UK.  Her debut ecopoetry collection, Hedge Fund, And Other Living Margins, is published by Shearsman Books (March 2012).

“Like the vision it preserves and celebrates, the language of this collection draws its strength from a deep rootedness in the natural world. At once eulogist for all that sustains our life and elegist for all that we despoil, Helen Moore emerges in Hedge Fund as an urgent, compelling and compassionate voice for these critical times.” – Lindsay Clarke

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2012/moore.html

Other books include Changing Nature, an illustrated nature journal documenting climate change and the ‘Hope stories’ for children ((Hope and the Magic Martian and Hope and the Super Green Highway, Lollypop Publishing).

Also working as a community artist and Forest School leader, Helen has a passion for inspiring people to connect more deeply with their creativity and the natural world.  This ranges from facilitating ‘Wild Ways to Writing’ outdoor workshops for adults to offering sustainability education in schools.  In 2011 she directed the Web of Life Community Art Project, drawing from creativity across the local community to highlight our deep interconnection with our planet, and the extinction crisis currently occurring.

For more details about her work, please visit: www.natures-words.co.uk

Olivia McCannon was born and grew up on Merseyside. She studied at the Queen’s College, Oxford (French/German), then at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), on an Entente Cordiale scholarship. She lived in France for nine years and is currently based in Harlesden, London and Belleville, Paris.

She writes poetry, short fiction, lyrics and librettos, and her translations from French include nineteenth century novels, twentieth century poetry, and contemporary Francophone plays.

Publications
Exactly My Own Length (Carcanet/Oxford Poets, 2011)

‘Olivia McCannon’s first collection explores life on the edge of possibility: in one moment the familiar is blown open, we plunge into the unknown. [...] From families improvising a living space in Cairo’s City of the Dead, to a veteran of the Normandy landings coming home to the peaceful reparation of ‘glueing, welding, soldering’, life is luminous, and resolutely seized.’

Oxford Poets Anthology 2007 (Carcanet)

Prizes and Awards
Hawthornden Fellowship (2005)
Shortlisted for Eric Gregory Award (2003)
Second prize Keats-Shelley Award (2003)
Shortlisted for Harpers and Queen/Orange Prize for Fiction Competition (2002) and Willesden Herald Prize (2008)

Other Publications
Old Man Goriot, Balzac (Penguin Classics, 2011) Translator
Poetry of Place: Paris (Eland, 2012) Co-translator
ABRSM Song Books (ABRSM, 2008) Singing translations/versions of international folk songs

Commissions
Sea Voices (Editions Musicales Européennes, 2000), for Narrator, Viola da Gamba, Choir and Orchestra
Composer: Thierry Pécou

Publisher author page
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=1000

Susan Utting, 2007’s Peterloo Poetry Prize winner and founder of Reading’s acclaimed Poets’ Café, has lived and worked in Berkshire since moving from Manchester in the 80s. She has worked as Community Laureate for the Arts Council’s Year of the Artist and was awarded the Creative Writing Fellowship at Reading University’s School of English and American Literature. She also taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Reading for 17 years. Press publication includes The North, New Welsh Review, The TLS, The Daily Mirror (Carol Ann Duffy’s choice) and The Times, for their feature Best Love Poems 2009. Poetry collections include Something Small is Missing (a Poetry Business prize winner) and Striptease (both Smith/Doorstop Books). Houses Without Walls (Two Rivers Press), was widely and warmly reviewed, featured in Independent on Sunday and included in the Forward Book of Poetry, Best Poem 2007 category. A new collection, Fair’s Fair, will be published by Two Rivers Press in March 2012.

www.susanutting.co.uk
www.tworiverspress.com/HousesWithoutWalls/HousesWithoutWalls.html
www.poetrypf.co.uk/susanuttingpage.html
www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in Hertfordshire. After working for many years as a secondary school teacher in London, she is now a freelance writer and tutor and lives in Wymondham, Norfolk.

Publications

Homesick for the Earth, versions of Jules Supervielle (Bloodaxe, 2011)

Europa (Bloodaxe, 2008) Poetry Book Society Choice

Split World: Poems 1990-2005 (Bloodaxe, 2008)

How the Stone Found its Voice (Bloodaxe, 2005)

Souls (Bloodaxe,2002)

Carrying My Wife (Bloodaxe,2000)

A Bowl of Warm Air (Oxford University Press, 1996)

The Country at My Shoulder (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Peacock Luggage (Smith/Doorstop, 1992)

Prizes and awards

TS Eliot prize 2008 shortlist

Cholmondeley Award 2002

TS Eliot prize 1993 shortlist

Whitbread Award 1993 shortlist

“Her voice is spare, oblique, surreal, compassionate and original. She has unique insight into splits, both emotional and cultural: “The receding east, the receding west”, as she laconically puts it. At the end of Split World, a selection from all her books, are the poems with which she became the first, and so far as I know the only, poet to explore sustainedly what 9/11 has meant to Muslims living in Europe.” Ruth Padel, The Guardian, May 2008

Poet’s website

Tiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin into an army family and has lived in Wales for many years. She is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University and has toured widely for the British Council in eastern Europe.

Publications

Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006) Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Catulla et al (Bloodaxe Books, 2011)

As editor
The Body: A Reader (Palgrave 2004)

Prizes & awards
Ottaker’s/Faber National Poetry Competition 1st prize 2000

Cardiff Academi International Poetry Competition 1st prize 2001

Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2006

Glen Dimplex New Writers Award shortlist 2006

“Many of the poems excited me in a way that gave me a physical tingle. I loved their sideways angle on things.  I loved their casual but controlled voice… These were poems I would love to have written!” Vicki Feaver on Kink and Particle.

Publisher’s website