PoetCasting

PoetCasting works with poets throughout the UK to podcast their work. The project features with performance poets, published poets, new poets, established poets and everything in between.

To find out more about the project visit the About section.

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Julia Bird grew up in Gloucestershire and now lives in London.

Julia has worked as an arts administrator and literature promoter since graduating; currently part-time for the Poetry School and freelance through her own small company Jaybird.

Her first collection Hannah and the Monk will be published by Salt in October 2008.

For more information, visit Jaybird or her poetry blog.

Jean Bleakney was born in Newry, Northern Ireland. A former biochemist, she currently lives in Belfast where she works in a garden centre.

She has two collections from Lagan Press: The Ripple Tank Experiment (1999) and The Poet’s Ivy (2003). Her poems appear in anthologies including The New Irish Poets, edited by Selina Guinness (Bloodaxe, 2004) and the forthcoming The New North, edited by Chris Agee (Wake Forest University Press, 2008). She has also been involved in various writing projects and residencies in local schools and hospitals. A third collection is approaching completion.

George Roberts was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1953 and spent the first couple of years travelling around navy bases. He moved to Oxford in 1983. He has worked as a chef and adult community education tutor and did 11 years in the oil industry, which took him regularly to the former Soviet Union. He now works as a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University.

He has been called a “post-Beat lyricist” and a “downbeat dub poet” and writes for page and stage. His poems have appeared in Fire, Magma, The Nail, New Poetry from Oxford, Password Scop, A3, and This poem is sponsored by... He has performed his work with Hammer & Tongue and other groups in Oxford, Reading, London, Brighton and Leamington Spa.

Gill Learner was born and grew up near Birmingham but now lives in Reading. In 2001 she won a limerick competition run by the Independent. She stopped trying to write short fiction and began writing poems.

Her poems have appeared in competition anthologies such as The Thames in Verse (River Thames Society); Blinking Eye 2004, 2005, 2006; Poetry Ealing 14 (Pitshanger); My mother threw knives (Second Light Network); Outbox (Leaf Books). Journals to have published her include Poetry News, Smiths Knoll, Tears in the Fence, Orbis and Envoi, and she’s been read on Radio 3 and read herself on BBC1 South Today. She was Highly Commended in the Petra Kenney competition 2006 and shortlisted for the Keats-Shelley Prizes 2006 and 2007

Gill finds inspiration in family past and present, the natural world, all the arts but particularly music, and technologies such as printing. She is particularly fond of Reading’s monthly Poets’ Café which features guest poets plus an open mic session in which she always participates.

Katy Evans-Bush was born in New York and has been living in London since she was 19. Her poems have appeared in magazines in the UK and the USA as well as the Continent, and she also writes frequent reviews and essays. She is a regular contributor to the Contemporary Poetry Review (www.cprw.com).

Her poem “The Master and the Future” won third prize in the Oxfam Poems for a Better Future competition in 2004. She was once of six poets featured in The Like Of It (Baring and Rogerson, 2005), and her first collection, Me and the Dead, will be published by Salt in 2008.

Her blog, Baroque in Hackney, is at www.baroqueinhackney.blogspot.com .

Cathy Ryan’s first chapbook I Dare You was published by Tall Lighthouse. Her performance at YLAF was a hit in 2006, and her poetry has been praised as being both ‘razor sharp’ and ‘arresting in their eroticism’.

Cathy has a deep rooted passion in theatre and performance. She also writes, dances and teaches the 5 Rhythms. She has much pleasure in this being human business.

Susan Utting was winner of the Peterloo Poetry Prize 2007. Her most recent collection, Houses Without Walls, (Two Rivers Press), featured in the Independent on Sunday and has been widely and warmly reviewed, with a poem from the collection selected for the Forward Book of Poetry 2007.

Her work has won many awards, including a Poetry Business Prize for the collection, Something Small is Missing, and she has twice been short listed for the Arvon Poetry Prize. The collection, Striptease, was published in 2001 by Smith/Doorstop Books.

Susan runs poetry workshops country wide and has taught poetry and creative writing at Reading University since 1993. She was appointed Community Laureate for Southern Arts’ Year of the Artist 2000/2001 and received the 2005-6 Creative Writing Fellowship from Reading University’s School of English & American Literature.

Susan is the founder of Reading’s acclaimed Poets’ Cafe, a member of Thin Raft Poets and Late Shift poetry ensemble. She has read and performed her poetry at a wide range of literature and arts festivals, including Ledbury Poetry Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and most recently at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

A writer and performer, Joyful Noise is also a youth worker having run music, poetry, expressive arts and political education programmes with young people all over the UK and recently in South Africa. For five and a half years Joyful Noise worked on a young peoples’ soap opera in Nicaragua, researching storylines and coordinating the scripts for the award winning television programme Sexto Sentido.

Now based in London, Joyful is involved in youth work, education consultancy, public speaking training for young people and the third sector and is studying Counselling with Creative Writing at Birkbeck College.

Jacqui Rowe was born in Birmingham, where she still lives. Her poems have appeared in Mslexia, The Interpreter’s House, Smtih’s Knoll, Poetry Review, and Reactions 2 and 3, and many other publications. Her collection, Blue, is published by Flarestack.

For a number of years she was an English teacher until Teachers as Poets sessions led by David Hart turned her into a poet. She now teaches the sessions that superseded Teachers as Poets, as well as the Making Poetry evening course at mac (Midlands Arts Centre), Birmingham, where she also hosts and programmes Poetry Bites, a regular event featuring readings by leading poets.