PoetCasting

Vahni Capildeo arrived in the UK in 1991 from Trinidad, where she was born in 1973. After completing a DPhil in Old Norse at Oxford University, she held a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge.

Her first volume of poetry, No Traveller Returns (Salt) appeared in 2003 which, with her subsequent prose poem pamphlet, Person Animal Figure (Landfill, 2005) has placed her as a writer’s writer. Her work has been anthologized in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (OUP, 2005) and appears in numerous literary journals.

‘Call It Simple: Two Exteriors’ is from Dark & Unaccustomed Words which is forthcoming in 2010 from Eggbox.

Read ‘The Critic In His Natural Habitat’ (pdf, right click and save as)

Read ‘Titanic’ (pdf, right click and save as)
Read ‘The Task’  (pdf, right click and save as)

Read ‘Call It Simple: Two Exteriors’  (pdf, right click and save as)

Jonathan Morley is a PhD researcher at the University of Warwick, investigating T. S. Eliot’s influence on Caribbean literature. His poetry won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, and he has given readings at international poetry festivals in Scotland, Portugal, Brazil and the Slovak Republic.

His first collection of poems, Backra Man, was published by Heaventree in 2008, and Backra Men, a jazz album with Si Hayden and Ben Haines, is available from Silvery Records.

These poems were recorded at Poetry Bites, a live poetry event at the Kitchen Garden Cafe, Birmingham. To find out more and hear floor spots from the event click here.

Writer and comedian Laurence Inman described Poetry Bites at the Kitchen Garden Cafe as ‘the best poetry night in Birmingham’. Poetry Bites is a bi-monthly event on Tuesday evenings at the Kitchen Garden Cafe, Kings Heath, Birmingham. It is run single-handedly, albeit with some loyal support, by Jacqui Rowe, who programmes and presents the event. Each session includes one guest poet and floor spots.

Based on a popular poetry event at MAC, Birmingham, which is currently closed for refurbishment, Poetry Bites has changed its character somewhat and gone from strength to strength after finding a home in the beautiful surroundings of the Kitchen Garden Cafe. It regularly attracts audiences of around fifty, with people travelling long distances to attend. A distinctive feature of Poetry Bites is the supportive and enthusiastic audience, who welcome both complete beginners and well-established professional poets reading from the floor.

Throughout the year, guest poets represent new and well-known, local and national voices. Amongst many others, guests have included Phillip Gross, Helen Mort, John Siddique, Susan Richardson and Mario Petrucci. The Kitchen Garden Cafe serves refreshments throughout the evening and excellent home-cooked food from 6.30 to 7.15. For more details, see www.jacquirowe.com or contact jacquirowe@hotmail.co.uk.

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Chris Jones has lived in Sheffield since 1990. He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry in 1996. From 1997 to 1999 he worked as a writer-in-residence at Nottingham Prison. He was the Literature Officer for Leicestershire for five years and then spent some time as a freelance writer and poetry festival organiser. He currently teaches creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

In 2007 he published his first full-length collection, The Safe House, with Shoestring Press. Here you can find his prison and River Don poems in full, along with pieces on family and travel.

A pamphlet collection of poems was produced with Longbarrow Press in November 2007. The sequence, entitled Miniatures, is concerned with the experiences of fatherhood, and reflections on wider family ties.

Saradha was born in London in 1974. She is the Poetry Editor of Chroma: A LGBT Literary Arts Journal. She currently facilitates cross-art workshops, mentoring and professional development for emerging writers and disabled artists with Spread The Word and Shape. Her poems have been published in Poetry Review and Wasafiri and in the Red Anthology 2009, The Forward Anthology 2008, Oxford Poets Anthology 2007, New Poetries IV, I am twenty People!, and This Little Stretch of Life.

She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2004 and is a currently on the advisory board for the US Journal Conclave and is a newly appointed trustee to Modern Poetry In Translation. The Guardian named Saradha as one of the ‘Twelve to watch’, up and coming new generation of poets.

Christopher Horton lives and works in London. His poems have been published (or are forthcoming) in various magazines including Iota, Fuselit, Dream Catcher, Other Poetry, The Wolf, Magma, Poetry London, Ambit and Stand, and in the anthologies City Lighthouse (Tall Lighthouse) and City State: The New London Poetry (Penned in the Margins). He is also a regular reviewer of poetry for magazines, blogs and websites.

Christopher organises and hosts/co-hosts for East Words and The Sampler, two new London poetry events. He was recently commended in the National Poetry Competition.

Ruth O’Callaghan, is a Hawthornden Fellow, competition adjudicator, interviewer and reviewer. A winner in International Poetry competitions, she hosts two poetry venues in London and has both compered and read at poetry festivals in the U.K. and abroad including the O2 festival in Hyde Park.

Her work is published in many anthologies and magazines and has been translated into Italian, Romanian and German. She was a featured poet in Take Five ’06, her first collection Where Acid Has Etched (bluechrome 2007) completely sold out and her new collection  A Lope of Time (Shoestring) was published in March 2009.

Philip Ruthen now lives in South London, where he originally spent his early years. His poetry, short fiction, book reviews, and associated articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications in the UK and abroad.

Jetty View Holding is his first collection of poetry, published by Waterloo Press (Hove), following the e-book publication in 2007 of a poetic-prose memoir One Hundred Days War from Chipmunkapublishing – who will also issue later in 2009 a collection of his new and selected short stories.

Philip is a trustee - and Chair for 2009/10 - of the national charity Survivors’ Poetry that works in mental health and literary arts arenas; he was recently guest editor for their quarterly magazine Poetry Express.

Sophie Mayer is a writer and educator. She studied and taught English literature and film studies at the universities of Cambridge and Toronto, and taken part in the poetry performance and publication scenes in both of those cities, as well as in London, where she now lives. Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009) is her first solo collection.
She is a Commissioning Editor for queer literary journal Chroma and is one of the “new lyric poets” included in Andy Brown’s anthology The Allotment. She blogs about literature for the English PEN Online Atlas, where she is a moderator, as well as writing regularly for Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and Vertigo about film, and for The F-Word, Venuszine and Shebytches about women and culture. She is the co-editor of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond and the author of The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love.

Sophie Mayer’s own webpage is here.

Alan Kellermann is carrying on the tradition of the Yanklo-Welsh writer (see Jon Dressel). Born in Wisconsin (USA), he is working towards a PhD at Swansea University in Swansea, Wales, where he is also poetry editor for the Swansea Review. He is also finalising the manuscript for his first collection, tentatively entitled There is Nothing Fuller or More Empty.

His work has most recently appeared in Planet, The Seventh Quarry, and Poetry Ireland Review. As well, several of his poems will be included in the Nu: Fiction and Stuff anthology forthcoming from Parthian.