Poets are famous rakes, seductresses and time travellers, are they not? Cast all doubt from your mind by taking in these ten tantalising accounts of extremely inter-generational flirtation, whereby prominent persons from history are left weak-kneed and willing. But is that all there is to it? Or are our poets, as poets tend to be, up to much else besides mere dalliance? And will they change the past forever, or vanish into it?
Kirsten Irving is a Lincolnshire-born, London-based poet and voiceover, and one half of the team behind collaborative press Sidekick Books. Her work has been published by Salt and Happenstance, widely anthologised and thrown out of a helicopter. She has won the Live Canon International Poetry Prize, judged competitions, and taught courses on folklore in poetry. Kirsten's latest collection, Hot Cockalorum, was published in 2022 by Guillemot Press.
Jon Stone is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher. He won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and his collection School of Forgery (Salt, 2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. As well as writing several shorter poetry books and co-editing a number of collaborative anthologies with Sidekick Books, he has published a monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames (DeGruyter, 2022). He teaches writing and publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
From https://pennyboxall.wordpress.com:
Penny Boxall is the author of three poetry collections: Ship of the Line, Who Goes There? (Valley Press, 2018) and, with woodblock artist Naoko Matsubara, In Praise of Hands (Ashmolean Museum, 2020). She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, the Mslexia/PBS Women’s Poetry Competition 2018, and a 2019 Northern Writers’ Award.
She is a Royal Literary Fund Bridge Fellow, working with sixth-form students in schools in Oxford and surrounding areas. She was the 2022/3 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, following two years as the RLF Fellow at the University of York. In 2019 she was Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, University of Oxford.
In July-August 2023 she was UNESCO Cities of Literature writer-in-residence in Kraków, Poland. This followed a residency in City of Literature Tartu, Estonia, in 2022. She is currently working with Estonian poet Maarja Pärtna and sound-artist Liis Ring on a collaborative project for Tartu European Capital of Culture 2024, alongside an installation of poems in hiking cabins along the Nordlandsruta for Bodø Capital of Culture (Norway).
‘Replaying the Tape’, her collaboration with palaeontologist Dr Frankie Dunn and percussionist Dr Jane Boxall, premiered in November 2023 in New York.
She is completing a new poetry collection with support from the Authors’ Foundation, and is the 2023-2024 Writer in Residence at Wytham Woods, University of Oxford, working on a sequence of poems about soil and layers of history.
Bio from https://www.morleycollege.ac.uk/staff/staff/rebecca-varley-winter:
Becky Varley-Winter is teacher of Creative Writing and English Literature. She is the author of Dangerous Enough (forthcoming, Salt Publishing, 2023), BLOOM (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), Heroines: On the Blue Peninsula (V. Press, 2019) and Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature (Sussex Academic Press, 2018). She’s also been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and Eric Gregory Awards, winner of T. R. Henn and Brewer Hall prizes for poetry.
Helen Bowell is a London-based writer. Her debut pamphlet The Barman (Bad Betty Press, 2022) was selected as the Poetry Book Society Summer 2022 Pamphlet Choice. She is currently working on Bi+ Lines, an Arts Council England funded project involving workshops and the first anthology of bi+ poets in English. Helen is also a co-director of Dead [Women] Poets Society, a live literature organisation which "resurrects" women poets of the past, and which completed an Arts Council England funded national tour 2019-21.
