Biographies of contributors
Polly Atkin
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), a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation. She has also published three pamphlets: bone song (Aussteiger, 2008), Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) and With Invisible Rain (New Walk: 2018).
Tiffany Atkinson
Tiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin in 1972 to an army family, and lived in Wales after moving to Cardiff to take a PhD in Critical Theory. After teaching at Aberystwyth University for some years, she is now Professor in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
She won the Cardiff Academi International Poetry Competition in 2001. Her first collection, Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. Catulla et al (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her second collection, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012 and was a TLS Book of the Year. Her third collection, So Many Moving Parts (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2015. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2022, a prize which recognises a poet's body of work.
She is the editor of a theoretical textbook, The Body: A Reader (2003), and has strong research interests in the medical humanities, especially the history of anatomy and representations of the body. Her fourth collection, Lumen (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, includes a sequence exploring representations of pain, illness and recovery – work that won the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize. She is currently working on a series of critical essays about ‘the poetics of embarrassment’.
Dean Atta
Dean Atta is a British author from London. He is a Malika's Poetry Kitchen member, National Poetry Day ambassador and LGBT+ History Month patron. Dean’s poems have been highly commended by the Forward Prizes for Poetry and shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. His books have been praised by the likes of Bernardine Evaristo, Benjamin Zephaniah and Malorie Blackman.
Dean’s debut poetry collection was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize and his novel in verse, The Black Flamingo (Hodder Children’s Books, 2019), won the Stonewall Book Award and was shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, Jhalak Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Waterstones Children’s Book Award. His second novel, Only on the Weekends (Hodder Children’s Books), came out in spring 2022. His second poetry collection, There is (still) love here, is out now with Nine Arches Press.
Jay Bernard
Jay Bernard is a British artist, writer, and poet from Croydon, London. Their multimedia performance work Surge: Side A received the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for new poetry. They co-authored Not Quite Right For Us, a volume of stories, essays, and poems by several writers edited by Sharmilla Beezmohun. They have also been shortlisted for several prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.
Alice Bridgwood
Alice Bridgwood is a content creator and digital communications strategist specialising in the non-profit sector. She has run award-winning global campaigns on women's and LGBTQ+ rights for clients such as Medicin sans Frontieres and the United nations, and worked in lead editorial roles for nonprofits including the National Literacy Trust and International Planned Parenthood. Passionate about the intersection between tech and civil society, she is strategic advisor to several start-ups in the online education and mental health spaces. Her latest campaign for digital library internet Archive received coverage in in hundreds of international news outlets and was nominated for a Webby award.
Stewart Carswell
Stewart Carswell grew up in the Forest of Dean. He currently lives and works and writes in Cambridgeshire, where he also co-hosts the Fen Speak open mic night, supporting writers from across the Fens. He studied Physics at Southampton University, and has a PhD from the University of
Bristol, and he approaches writing poetry with the mindset of a scientist. His poems have recently been published in Under the Radar, Dreich, Ink Sweat & Tears, and The Lighthouse; and he has performed poetry at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Gloucester Poetry Festival, The Troubadour, around Cambridge and East Anglia, and at various outdoor locations in the Forest of Dean and Bristol. His pamphlet "Knots andbranches" was published in 2016, and his debut full-length collection "Earthworks" was published by Indigo Dreams in 2021.
https://stewartcarswell.co.uk Twitter: @stewcarswell
Jessica Jane Charleston
Jessica Jane Charleston is an artist based in London who grew up in Suffolk. Jessica graduated from the Royal Drawing School in 2017 and considers drawing to be at the heart of her work. In 2020 she was awarded the Young Artist Award from the Royal Watercolour Society which encouraged her to delve deeper into painting on paper. She draws her dreams, her son, her imagination, herself. These drawings act as a starting point for her paintings, prints, books and clay figures. Her work often focuses on the female form and the ideas of womanhood and more recently - motherhood.
Elizabeth Cook
Elizabeth Cook is a poet, fiction writer, and librettist. She is the author of Achilles ('a terrifying, erotic tour de force', Observer), and Lux, a novel which embraces the stories of David and Bathsheba and the Tudor poet, Thomas Wyatt. ('Hugely ambitious and very beautiful', Saturday Review). She has published two full collections of poetry, Bowl and When I Kiss the Sky, as well as a pamphlet, The Sound of the Rain. She lived in Suffolk for ten years and was St Edmundsbury Cathedral's first Writer in Residence.
Sarah Corbett
Sarah Corbett has published 5 collections of poetry, most recently A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion Poetry/Liverpool University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of After Sylvia: New Poems and Essays in Celebration of Sylvia Plath (forthcoming from Nine Arches Press, 2022). Her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes, and widely translated and anthologised. Sarah Is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster