Aftershock Poets

Adam Horovitz, a poet and performer based in Gloucestershire, has published three books of poetry, and a memoir about growing up in Laurie Lee country, and appeared on Cerys Matthews’ album We Come from the Sun (Decca, 2021). His next book, Slow Migrations, will be published by Indigo Dreams in 2025.

Becky Cherriman is a Leeds-based writer, educator and performer who writes with chronic health issues and enjoys collaborations that address social issues. Her poetry has been published by Seren, Mslexia, The North, Moving Worlds and Bloodaxe, in her pamphlet Echolocation (Mother’s Milk) and collection Empires of Clay (Cinnamon Press). www.beckycherriman.com

Clare Pollard’s most recent books are the children’s novel The Untameables and the adult novel The Modern Fairies. She has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, with her sixth, Lives of the Female Poets, forthcoming in 2025. Her poem ‘Pollen’ was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

David Tait’s work includes The AQI, which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize. Poems appear in Poetry Review, The Rialto and The Poetry Foundation, as well as anthologies such as Staying Human and 100 Queer Poems. He lives in Shanghai.

Dr Golnoosh Nour is a British Iranian writer and lecturer. She is the author of The Ministry of Guidance (2020) and Rocksong (2021) – both shortlisted for the Polari Prize. Golnoosh’s poetry pamphlet Impure Thoughts came out in 2022, and was shortlisted for the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition. She has also been published by Granta and Vintage.

Gwyneth Lewis (FRSL) is a bilingual poet and memoirist from Cardiff, and was the first National Poet of Wales. Her sixth English-language collection, First Rain in Paradise (Bloodaxe, 2025), explores trauma and recovery. She has also published four collections in Welsh. Her memoir Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (Calon, 2024) confronts emotional abuse by her mother with honesty and lyricism. A recipient of the MBE, Lewis is known for her powerful work on survival, mental health, and transformation.

Inua Ellams is a Nigerian-born poet, playwright and performer. His five acclaimed poetry collections include The Actual and #Afterhours, exploring identity, displacement and resilience. A Fringe First winner, he is a Fellow and Board Member of the Royal Society of Literature. His work spans stage, screen and print, with commissions from the BBC and National Theatre. In 2023, he was awarded an MBE for Services to the Arts.

Jacqueline Saphra is the author of nine plays, five chapbooks and five poetry collections. Her second collection, All My Mad Mothers (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and her fifth, Velvel’s Violin, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Radio 4 Extra Poetry Book of the month.

Jeremy Dixon is a prize-winning poet, editor and workshop leader. He is the author of the pamphlets In Retail (Arachne Press, 2019) and Bold in the Life (Broken Sleep Books, 2025). His collection A Voice Coming from Then (Arachne Press, 2021) won Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2022.

Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, and songwriter whose books include The Last Song of the World, The Swallows of Lunetto, and Fugue for Other Hands. He has won the Rattle Poetry Prize and the Cider Press Review Book Award, received eight Pushcart nominations, and was nominated for the prestigious Poets’ Prize. His work is widely translated.

Mark Antony Owen is the author of digital-first poetry project Subruria. He’s also the creator and curator of online poetry journals iamb and After…

Miles Hadfield is a Manchester-based poet, writer and performer, whose zine of poetry and flash fiction, Pop Pop Pop, is available from mileshadfield@hotmail.com and his work can be seen at youtube.com/@PoetMiles/videos

Pascale Petit’s ninth poetry collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe in 2025, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her novel, My Hummingbird Father, was published by Salt in 2024. She has published nine collections, four of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Mama Amazonica won Ondaatje and Laurel prizes and Tiger Girl was shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Polly Atkin (FRSL) is a poet and nonfiction writer, whose work focuses on nature, place and disability. She lives in the English Lake District, where she co-owns historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.

Richard Skinner has published seven books of poems, the most recent of which is White Noise Machine (Salt, 2023). Richard is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy. He also runs a small press, Vanguard Editions, and is the current editor of 14 magazine.

Rushika Wick runs sunseekers poetry project with Ana Seferovic - curating multidisciplinary and cross-modal arts events. She has collaborated with dancers, produced ekphrastic work for the National Gallery and creates poem objects. Her work has been widely published. Her latest collection Horse (Broken Sleep 2024) concerns speculative archives.

Sophie Hall is a comedy poet from Bolton, now living in London. She is a Roundhouse Poetry Slam finalist and has performed her work up and down the UK and for radio. Her favourite artistic focuses are on the more mundane moments of life. Because, why not?

Max Wallis is an award-winning poet, shortlisted for the Polari Prize. His poems appear in Vogue, The Rialto, and Poetry Scotland. He edits The Aftershock Review. His latest book is Well Done, You Didn't Die (Verve Poetry Press).

A. Arwen Taylor is an English professor in the American South, where she lives with her partner, cat, and many backyard squirrels. Her academic interests are primarily in pragmatics and language change, medieval literature, and medievalisms; this is her first poetry publication.

Anne E. Bailey is a Yorkshire woman writing poems in North Norfolk. Her pamphlet ‘What the House Taught Us’ was published in 2021 by Emma Press. Her work has been widely published in journals. She is a committee member for Café Writers organising live poetry events in Norwich and on Zoom.

Beth Hurst grew up in Wigan, but now lives in East London. She just completed a master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, where she focused on fiction and poetry. Her writing appears in The Vanity Papers, Warepeople and was longlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025.

Chivonne Head is a poet from South Yorkshire. She has featured in numerous publications: LiveWire Poetry magazine, Doncaster Sand House, Sixty Odd Poets, Starbeck Orion, and was a runner up in the Doncaster Railway 200 Poetry Competition. She teaches various poetry workshops across the South Yorkshire region.

Daniel Darley is a singer-songwriter, recording artist and now poet from Prestwich, Manchester. His writing is inspired by philosophy, sexuality, mental health and his lived experience. It’s an attempt, through writing, to transcend.

Dr. Gurpreet Kaur is a scholar and endometriosis survivor who turned five years in a wheelchair into fuel for justice. A TEDx and WHO speaker, she reimagines survival as resistance—writing, teaching, and fighting at the intersections of gender, human rights, and climate justice.

Fiona Larkin was the winner of the National Poetry Competition 2024. Her debut collection, Rope of Sand, is published by Pindrop Press (2023). The title poem was highly commended in the Forward Prizes. Her pamphlets are Vital Capacity (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and A Dovetail of Breath (Rack Press, 2020).

World Poetry Slam Champion Harry Baker is a poet, a maths graduate, and a new father. His new collection Tender is published with Canongate in March 2026 alongside a national tour, and he can’t flipping wait. He lives and writes and swims and runs and takes his baby to nice coffee shops in Margate.

Jack Solloway is a writer from the West Midlands living in London. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and Poetry Wales; his prose in Modern Poetry in Translation, The London Magazine, and TLS. His book of poems SERIOUSLY is out now with Broken Sleep Books.

Jason Purcell is the author of Crohnic and Swollening and is a PhD student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Julia Webb is a neurodivergent writer from a working-class background who lives in Norwich. She has four poetry collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016), Threat (2019) The Telling (2022) and Grey Time (2025). She is a poetry editor for Lighthouse . Her fourth collection Grey Time comes out in July 2025.

Kim Moore’s most recent collection All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her third collection The House of Broken Things is forthcoming from Corsair in May 2026. She is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Lydia Unsworth is an NWCDTP-funded PhD candidate at the Centre for Place Writing, MMU, looking at kinship with disappearing architecture in a post-industrial landscape. Her latest book, Arthropod, is published by Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers, and she has two new poetry collections coming out in 2026, Stay Awhile and This Now Extends to My Daughter.

Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His latest collection, The Island in the Sound, was published in September of 2024 by Bloodaxe Books.

Pratibha Castle, a finalist in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Award, 2024, and was shortlisted in the Fish, Live Canon, and Bridport Poetry Competitions 2024. Widely published, including Under the Radar, Lighthouse, IS&T, Stand, and awarded third prize in Sonnet or Not, Plaza Prize 2024, and acknowledged in numerous other competitions, she was commended in the McLellan Poetry Prize 2025. Her second pamphlet Miniskirts in The Waste Land was a Poetry Book Society winter selection 2023.

Samuel Tongue’s collections include Sacrifice Zones (Red Squirrel, 2020) and three pamphlets: The Nakedness of the Fathers (Broken Sleep, 2022), Stitch (Tapsalteerie, 2018), Hauling-Out (Eyewear, 2016). Poems have appeared in different places, including Magma, Poetry Wales, Finished Creatures, Perverse, and Banshee Lit.

Simon Maddrell appears in & Change, Gutter, Magma, Poetry Wales, SAND, Southword, Stand, The Moth, The Rialto, Under the Radar, and others. Their sixth pamphlet, Patient L1, was published by Polari Press in Feb 2025. Out-Spoken Press will publish Simon’s debut collection, lamping wild rabbits, in Feb 2026.

Tim Relf’s debut collection is out with Salt Publishing in November 2026. His most recent novel, published by Penguin, was translated into more than 20 languages. Based in Leicestershire, he is a former poet-in-residence at Leicester Botanic Garden.

Vona Groarke’s Infinity Pool was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2025. She is the current Ireland Professor of Poetry.

Andy Jackson has published four collections of poetry including The Saints Are Coming! (Blue Diode, 2020) and Games Night (Red Squirrel Press, 2023). He is editor/co-editor of 12 anthologies including Split Screen/Double Bill (Red Squirrel 2012/2014). He co-edits the magazine Poetry Scotland, and several online poetry projects including New Boots and Pantisocracies.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by BOA Editions. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, NY and teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch.

Clare Shaw, born in Burnley in 1972, is the author of four poetry collections with Bloodaxe, including Towards a General Theory of Love. An award-winning poet, performer, and mental health educator, they champion poetry as social change and are known for their visceral, electrifying readings across the UK.

Di Slaney lives in Nottinghamshire where she runs livestock sanctuary Manor Farm Charitable Trust and independent publisher Candlestick Press. She was the winner of The Plough Poetry Prize 2022. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and widely published; her collections are available from Valley Press.

Erika Przibram Wallis (1926–2023) was a Holocaust survivor and daughter of physicist Karl Przibram. Born in Vienna, she fled Nazi persecution during the Anschluss and later settled in Britain, where she began a PhD in zoology before leaving it to farm with her husband, John Wallis. She was a sculptor, wife, mother, grandmother — and, it turned out, a poet too.

HLR is a prize-winning working-class poet from North London. She is the author of History of Present Complaint (First Cut) and EX-CETERA (Nine Pens). She was commended in the National Poetry Competition and Free Verse Prize, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, Bridport Prize and Cheltenham Prize.

JP Seabright (she/they) is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have six solo pamphlets published and four collaborations, encompassing poetry, prose and experimental work. More info at https://jpseabright.com via Twitter/X @errormessage and @jpseabright everywhere else.

Jane Burn is a poet, artist and working-class person with autism / person with a hEDS. Her work is widely published. Her current collection, The Apothecary of Flight, is published by Nine Arches. Her pamphlet, Epigone, is published by Tapsalteerie, as part of the book Reflections Glimmer: Poems Exploring Ekphrasis.

Jess Rahman-González (they/them) works across poetry, film, and live art. Their writing currently focuses on their experiences of being inpatient on eating disorder wards. Jess is a Barbican Young Poet and previously chilled with Roundhouse Poetry Collective, Soho Theatre's Writers' Lab and Royal Court's playwriting group. Jess was also a Barbican Open Labs artist and Starting Blocks resident artist at Camden People’s Theatre.

Katy Evans-Bush’s latest poetry collection, ’Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle’ (CB Editions), was one of the Guardian’s top 10 poetry books of 2024. She writes a Substack called A Room of Someone Else’s and lives in Kent. She is a freelance editor and poetry tutor. http://katyevansbush.com

Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Her debut collection of poems, CITADEL (Pavilion, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. Her new translation of the poems and prose of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross is forthcoming from Penguin Classics.

Muzhgan Saghar, born in Kabul in 1977, fled Taliban rule in 2000 and now lives in Germany, where she has worked as a teacher since 2010. Her poetry collections include The Colorless Apple (2014), The Sun Rains (2020), The Restless Ocean (2020), and Songs of Freedom (2023). She’s been featured by the House of Poetry Berlin and served on the Zhaleh Esfahani Festival jury.

Paul Stephenson’s debut collection Hard Drive was published by Carcanet in June 2023 and shortlisted for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Polari Book Prize. He is also the author of three pamphlets: Those People (Smith|Doorstop, 2015), The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017).

Rachael Boast’s recent publications include Hotel Raphael (Picador, 2021) and TIMESLIPS (Clutag Press, 2024). She is editor of Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). Rachael is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A poem from Rishi Dastidar’s Laurel Prize long-listed third collection, Neptune’s Projects (Nine Arches Press), was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2024. He also reviews poetry for The Guardian and is chair of Wasafiri, the leading magazine of international contemporary writing.

Sam Riviere is the author of the poetry books 81 Austerities (Faber & Faber, 2012), Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (Faber & Faber, 2015), and After Fame (Faber & Faber, 2020), as well as numerous limited-edition titles. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2009, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2012.

Oliver James Lomax is a poet, educator, and trustee of the Working-Class Movement Library in Salford. He passionately believes in cultural equality and the power of the arts to enable everyone in society to have a voice.

Alys Conran’s work has won or been shortlisted for several awards including Wales Book of the Year and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her first novel Pigeon is on the GCSE curriculum (WJEC). She teaches Creative Writing at Bangor, her hometown, and is a commissioning editor at Folding Rock.

Ben Verinder holds an MA in Writing Poetry from The Poetry School and Newcastle University. His debut pamphlet, Botanicals, was published by Frosted Fire in 2021 and his second, We Lost The Birds, by Nine Pens in 2023. He is the 2024/5 Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year.

Bobby Parker is a British poet and visual artist. Known for his raw, confessional style, Parker explores mental health, addiction, love, and working-class life with brutal honesty and dark humour. A collection of New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in 2026.

Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a poet and guitarist. His works appear in Hudson Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Adroit, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Alpine Fellowship Prize. He won the 2024 After the End Poetry Prize organized at Oxford University as well as Prism International’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Contest.

Dean Atta is an award-winning Black British poet and author of Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage. His works include The Black Flamingo (Stonewall Book Award winner), Only on the Weekends, and I Am Nobody’s Nigger. His memoir Person Unlimited was praised by Michael Rosen as “wonderfully original.” Also a screenwriter, his film Two Black Boys in Paradise premiered at BFI Flare.

Elizabeth Osmond is a neonatal doctor and poet. She writes as a form of reflective practice and has been widely published including in The Alchemy Spoon, Ink Sweat and Tears, Atrium, Hog River Press and Dust. She won prizes in the Hippocrates competition in 2021 and 2024. Find her on Bluesky @bethosmond.bsky.social

George Szirtes is a Hungarian-born British poet, translator, and memoirist who arrived in England as a refugee in 1956. His debut collection, The Slant Door, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Reel won the T. S. Eliot Prize. Also shortlisted for the Eliot multiple times, he is acclaimed for his lyrical precision and translations of Hungarian literature. His memoir The Photographer at Sixteen was widely praised.

Ian Duhig worked with homeless people for fifteen years before becoming a writer. He has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and his New and Selected Poems the 2022 Hawthornden Prize for Literature. ‘An Arbitrary Light Bulb’ was the Poetry Book Society 2024 Winter Choice.

Winner of the inaugural Disabled Poets Prize, Jamie Field has had poems published in Banshee, Magma, the North and elsewhere. He is also a New Northern Poet 2025, and a Poetry Ireland Introductions recipient 2021. Originally from Pontefract, West Yorkshire, he lives and works in Blackpool, Lancashire.

Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester where she is a regional editor for the online art writing platform Corridor8. Her fifth poetry chapbook Snagged on red thread will be published by Monitor Books in October 2025. She is currently undertaking practice-based research in art writing and ekphrastic encounters at Sheffield University.

Karan Chambers (she/her) is a poet, tutor, and former English teacher. Karan has poems published (or forthcoming) in The London Magazine, Gutter, Under the Radar, 14 Magazine, and Banshee. Her pamphlet ‘woman | folk’ is available from Salò Press. She lives in Surrey with her husband and three children.

Leila Segal is the author of Breathe (flipped eye, 2016), a short story collection, and of the forthcoming memoir You Came Back, a story of love and survival alongside her husband Rod Nordland, who lived with glioblastoma for six years. Leila leads Voice of Freedom , a participatory photography project with survivors of human trafficking.

Marjorie Lotfi is an Iranian-American-Scottish poet and memoirist whose debut collection The Wrong Person to Ask won the 2024 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her work explores migration, displacement, and belonging. Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize, she is co-founder of Open Book and leads creative writing retreats across the UK.

Oz Hardwick has been described as a “major proponent of the neo-surreal prose poem in Britain.” He has published “fifteen or so” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.”

Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams 2014) concerns our broken connection with nature. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4Word 2018) and latest collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else (Seren 2023) explores themes of identity and otherness, including migrant heritage, LGBTQ+ https://rachaelclyne.substack.com @rachaelclyne.bsky.social

Sean O’Brien’s twelfth collection of poems, The Bonfire Party, is due from Picador in January 2026. In 2025 he published The Eye of the Island: Poems of Corsino Fortes, translated with Daniel Hahn (Poetry Translation Centre), the pamphlet À la Carte (New Walk) and the short story collection The Long Glass (Postbox). Winner of awards including the T.S. Eliot, Forward and E.M. Forster, O’Brien is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Stef Pixner is a poet and short story writer living in London. She has published a poetry collection with Virago press, and her short stories have been published in the Missouri Review and the Bridport and Fish anthologies, among other publications.

Tyler R. Harris is a blind queer poet from Dundas, Ontario, Canada. She has an undergrad and Masters in History, attended the Humber School for Writers, and has a Masters in Creative Writing. She is doing her PhD in Poetry— writing about disability joy and life as a visually impaired woman.

Yvonne Reddick’s collection Burning Season (Bloodaxe) won the Laurel Prize for Best First UK Collection of Ecopoetry and was a BBC Radio 4 Poetry Extra Book of the Month. It was shortlisted for the Saltire and ASLE book awards. She is an editor at Consilience poetry journal.

Angi Holden is a retired lecturer, whose poetry and prose explore differing perspectives of relationships and identity, within a broader context of memory. She has been writing most of her life, most recently at a desk so covered in leaves and feathers collected by her grandchildren that it resembles a nature table.

Claire Snook is a writer who has seen first-hand how quickly life can change. Diagnosed with a meningioma tumor, she has gone through the rollercoaster of treatment, recovery, and now managing her disabilities. She shares her highs and lows so others won’t feel so alone.

Dale Booton (he/him) is a queer poet from Birmingham. His poetry is published by The North and Magma, and anthologised by Broken Sleep Books, Verve, Muswell Press, and Pan Macmillan. He has two pamphlets: ‘Walking Contagions’ (Polari Press) and ‘On This Stretch of Queerland’ (Fourteen Poems). He is a runner-up in the 2024 International Book and Pamphlet Competition.

Dominique Dunne is a former Barbican poet and poetry producer for the Shake the Dust Festival at Southbank Centre. She has supported Kae Tempest, performed at Ronnie Scott’s, and delivered a TEDx talk on original writing. Dominique holds a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has taught poetry to both children and adults. Writing from personal experience on heartache and joy, she believes that ‘Poetry can bridge the gap between the personal and the universal.’ Currently, she works as a creative career coach, helping young people break into the arts.

Gregory Woods is the author of six poetry collections from Carcanet Press, the latest being Records of an Incitement to Silence (2021). His booklet, They Exchange Glances: Gay Modernist Poems in Translation (2024), is with Hercules Editions. His main books on gay cultural history are with Yale University Press.

Hugo Williams is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including West End Final (2009), Collected Poems (2002), Billy’s Rain (1999), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, Selected Poems (1989), and his Eric Gregory Award–winning debut, Symptoms of Loss (1965). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2004.

Jackie Hagan (1981-2024) was an award-winning Skelmersdale-born, Manchester-based poet, comedian and playwright famed for her thrilling performances - which can be seen at youtube.com/@JackieLuv1981 - and biting, off-kilter take on class, sexuality and disability. Work is under way on some final collections of her work. Details will appear at instagram.com/haganartist/

Jenny Pagdin is the author of The Snow Globe (Nine Arches, 2024) and Caldbeck (Eyewear, 2017), both exploring her experiences of postpartum psychosis. Winner of the 2024 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, she was highly commended in the Bridport Prize, shortlisted for the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, and placed second in the Café Writers Prize. Her work appears in Poetry London, Magma, The Emma Press, and elsewhere.

John McCullough’s collection Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins) won the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. ‘Flower of Sulphur’, from his most recent collection Panic Response, was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He lives in Hove.

Madailín Burnhope is a Warwickshire-based poet featured in publications including Magma, Under The Radar, Ink Sweat and Tears, Gallus, Poetry Wales, Stairs and Whispers (Nine Arches), The Poetry Review, and Versus Versus (Bloodaxe). Her collection is Species (Nine Arches). Her poem ‘You Wouldn’t Last Five Minutes as a Woman’ was Highly Commended in the 2024 Forward Prizes.’

Poet, artist and impresario Michael Horovitz (1935-2021) helped bring poetry out of the hallowed halls it hid in the 1950s into pubs, clubs and concert halls. Founder of avant garde magazine New Departures, and the Poetry Olympics, he championed poetry, and collaboration between poets and other artists, until his death.

Nuala Watt is a Quaker and disability activist. Her first collection, The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish (Blue Diode 2024) was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year.

Pele Cox, a graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing MA under Andrew Motion, has held residencies at Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, the British School at Rome, and the Keats-Shelley House. She creates poetry performances for major exhibitions, runs a poetry series in Ludlow, and is currently producing a trilogy of short films about the Romantic Poets.

Rhian Elizabeth is a trainee counsellor and a writer. She is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and was previously Writer in Residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival in Tranås, Sweden. Her latest collection of poetry, maybe i’ll call gillian anderson, will be published in May by Broken Sleep Books.

Rosie Garland writes poetry, long and short fiction, and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Latest novel ‘The Fates’ (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates. In 2023, she was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, & Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today. Her new poetry collection ‘This Is How I Fight’ (Nine Arches Press) is out in June 2025.

Soledad Santana is a Venezuelan, London-based poet, feminist community organiser, and human rights researcher. She’s a current member of the Barbican Young Poets programme. She has co-created various zines, including Tangled Tongues / Lenguas Enredadas, which examines the politics of monolingual publications and self-translation, and collates Spanglish poetry and short fiction. Recently, she’s interested in the new Latin American gothic. Instagram: @Lasoledadsantana

Dr Anna Percy, a bisexual poet with bipolar disorder, completed her groundbreaking thesis at MMU: Bipolar Magpie: a 21st Century Embodied Eco-Feminist Poetics, focused on mad studies and eco-poetry. She has three collections with Flapjack Press and co-founded Stirred Poetry. Her work blends performance, experimental poetics, feminism, and the natural world, shaped by two decades of community teaching and a commitment to redefining what it means to be a mad-identified scholar. She is Contributing Editor at The Aftershock Review.

Suzi Feay was literary editor of the Independent on Sunday for 11 years, and subsequently its poetry reviewer. She has published poems in The London Magazine, Magma, Poetry Review and Poetry Scotland, and has read at various literary festivals, the Courtauld gallery in London, and the South Bank. She is a member of the Critics Circle and the Authors Club, and a regular judge of the annual Polari Prize. She is Contributing Editor at The Aftershock Review.

Anna Maughan lives in Bristol, UK. The overarching themes of Anna’s poetry are chronic illness, trauma/mental health issues, and motherhood, and the way that these things intersect in her life. Her kids have saved her countless times. She has been featured or has work upcoming in Humana Obscura, Dust, Ink Sweat and Tears, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Cottonmouth, amongst others.

Benjamin J. Larner is a disabled poet of Iraqi-Chaldean, Irish, and Ashkenazi heritage. Runner-up in the 2025 Spread the Word and CRIPtic Arts Disabled Poets Prize and the 2024 Ivan Juritz Prize, recent publications include The Poetry Review, Propel Magazine, PROTOTYPE 7 and Gutter Magazine.

Carrie Etter is the author of five collections of poetry. Earlier this year she published two chapbooks, Cloudbreak: Haiku and Senryu, 1987-2018 (Red Ceilings), and Veer, Oscillate, Rest (Shearsman Books). She teaches creative writing at the University of Bristol.

D. A. Angelo, a UK based poet, was shortlisted for the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize and the 2025 Artemesia Arts Poetry Competition. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma, The Shore, The York Literary Review, Spellbinder, South, BarBar and The Crank.

Dechen Shaw has poems in IS&T, Acumen and Southword. She is a Writing Poetry MA graduate from Newcastle University, also a playwright (Lucy Shaw), currently mentored by Pascale Petit on Arvon’s Advanced Writing Programme, funded by Arts Council England and recovering from 12 years living with ME / debilitating CPTSD / initiation.

Ella B. Winters is a social worker, writer and immigrant living on the South-East coast of England. Her work often explores themes of identity and locating yourself in the world. She is currently working on her PhD.

Glyn Maxwell’s most recent poetry books are The Big Calls and How The Hell Are You, shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2020. He posts a weekly Substack called Silly Games to Save the World. He is Head of Studies on The Poetry School’s MA and is training in psychotherapy. In 2024 he began 101 poems for 101 endangered species, some of which are published here.

JLM Morton’s poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia and The London Magazine. She is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and was highly commended by the Forward Prizes. Her debut poetry collection is Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024).

Jasmine Jade Plumpton is a poet and facilitator from South Shields. She recently completed an AHRC-funded Creative Writing PhD at Newcastle University and is working towards her first collection of poetry. Her research explores how the trauma of class migration can be explored and articulated through creative practice.

Jeff Skinner’s poems are widely published, most recently in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Fragmented Voices, London Grip; before that, in Poetry News, Acumen, The Alchemy Spoon, Poetry Salzburg, among others. He volunteers at his local food bank and in an Oxfam bookshop, listens to music, watches football, reads, writes.

Katrina Naomi’s fourth poetry collection, Battery Rocks, (Seren, 2024) won the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, the Holyer an Gof award for Poetry, and was recommended in The Guardian. She has just published dance as if, with Verve. Katrina is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize.

Lewis Buxton’s work has appeared in Poetry Review, The Rialto, and The Independent and won The Winchester Poetry Prize. His first collection, Boy in Various Poses (Nine Arches Press) was published in 2021, followed by Mate Arias (The Emma Press) in 2025. He lives in Norfolk.

Megan McInerney is a researcher with a fascination for all forms of political extremism. She believes in centring the experiences of working-class, queer and peripheral people. She doesn’t believe in a division between critical and creative practice and wants to see universities burn.

Pippa Little has three collections from Carcanet and Arc and is completing her fourth. Her work is published in print, online and anthologised. She has won several prizes, awards and fellowships. She has recently taught poetry courses for The Faber Academy.

Rolf Hind is a composer and pianist, and has worked all over the world - including seven times at the BBC Proms, at Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall. He has written everything from piano music to an opera about Rumi. He also cooks, learns languages, knits, travels and writes poetry.

Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistan-born Canadian poet and translator. Her poems have been anthologised and published in the UK, Canada and the U.S. and The Glimmer (Bloodaxe Books, 2022) is her latest collection. A Complete Works alumna, she teaches at Poetry Studio and The Poetry School.

Susan Jane Sims has been passionate about poetry since childhood. Her most recent collection Splitting Sunlight, completed during a Hawthornden fellowship, bears witness to the last months of her son Mark’s life with malignant melanoma. She runs her own publishing company Poetry Space from her Dorset home.

Victoria Chang, Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and director of Poetry@Tech, is the author of With My Back to the World and other acclaimed books including OBIT, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf and LA Times Book Prizes. A Forward Prize and Guggenheim fellow, she has received NEA and Chowdhury awards.