Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History
Edited by Claire Trévien and Gareth Prior, with a foreword by Hannah Lowe
Biographies of contributors
James Brookes grew up in rural Sussex before reading English & Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and a postgraduate degree at the College of Law. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2009 and published a pamphlet, The English Sweats, with Pighog Press in the same year. His first collection Sins of the Leopard (Salt, 2012) was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Matt Bryden is an EFL teacher, which has taken him to Tuscany, The Czech Republic and Poland. Night Porter, which documents life in a Yorkshire hotel, was a winner of the Templar Pamphlet and Collection prize 2010, and his first collection Boxing the Compass was launched at Keats House in 2013. The Desire to Sing after Sunset, his translation of the Taiwanese poet Ami, was launched at the Taipei literature festival 2013. In 2012, he toured The Captain’s Tower, an anthology of poetry about Bob Dylan, at venues across the UK including the Latitude festival || www.mattbryden.co.uk
Karen Jane Cannon has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her novel Powder Monkey was published by Orion in 2002. She has written for radio and stage and was a winner of the Woolwich Young Radio Playwright’s Award in 1996. Her poems have appeared in a wide range of print and online journals including Orbis, Acumen and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She has been short-listed for several poetry and short story competitions. She is currently researching a creative PhD and is working on her first pamphlet. She also enjoys writing articles on history for magazines. || www.karen-jane-cannon.co.uk
David Clarke was born in Lincolnshire and now lives in Gloucestershire. His pamphlet, Gaud, was joint winner of the Flarestack Poets prize in 2012 and won the Michael Marks Award 2013.
Ross Cogan received a Gregory Award in 1999, and has published two collections, Stalin’s Desk (2005) and The Book I Never Wrote (2012), both with Oversteps Press. As well as being Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival he works as a freelance writer and editor. Ross has won the Exeter, Frogmore poetry, Staple, Crabbe Memorial and Cannon Sonnet prizes. His poetry and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines, including PN Review, The Rialto, Poetry London, New Welsh Review, Acumen, Stand and Orbis, among others.
Sasha Dugdale is a poet, translator and editor. Her translation of Elena Shvarts’s Birdsong on the Seabed (Bloodaxe) was a PBS choice and was shortlisted for the Popescu and Academica Rossica Translation Awards. She has translated plays for the Royal Court, the RSC and other theatre companies. Her most recent collection of her own poems, Red House, was published by Carcanet in 2011. She is editor of Modern Poetry in Translation.
MartÃn Espada has published more than fifteen books. His latest book of poems, The Trouble Ball (Norton), received the Milt Kessler Award, a Massachusetts Book Award and an International Latino Book Award. His previous collection, The Republic of Poetry (Norton) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza (Norton), about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program and outlawed by the state of Arizona. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Shelley Memorial Award, Espada teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Poet Rebecca Goss grew up in Suffolk. She returned to live in the county in 2013, after living in Liverpool for twenty years. Her first collection The Anatomy of Structures was published by Flambard Press in 2010. Her second collection Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House), was shortlisted for The 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection and winner of the Poetry Category in The 2013 East Anglian Book Awards. She blogs at: http://rebeccagoss.wordpress.com/
Hel Gurney is a writer of poetry, prose, and fairytales that are somewhere between the two. Their poem ‘Hair’ was nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Awards, and their poetry has been printed in Stone Telling, Verse Kraken, and a number of anthologies. Occasional sonneteer, sometime slam performer, translator from dead languages – Hel’s poetry is a patchwork of old and new. They are also a queer-feminist activist and occasional gender academic. Hel can be found at helgurney.wordpress.com or haunting the bookshops and cafés of London, Oxford, and Brighton.
Linn Hansén lives in Göteborg, Sweden.
Emily Hasler is a poet who lives and works in London and has experienced 29 years of history for herself, without learning its lessons. Her debut pamphlet Natural Histories was published by Salt in 2011 and in 2014 she received an Eric Gregory Award.
Sarah Hesketh is a poet and freelance project manager, whose first full collection Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf was published by Penned in the Margins in 2009. In 2013 she was a poet in residence with Age Concern. She kept a blog about her experiences at http://wheretheheartispreston.tumblr.com/ and a book of poems resulting from the residency, The Hard Word Box, will be published in autumn 2014.
Holly Hopkins lives in London where she is reading an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Holly won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and her debut pamphlet, Soon Every House Will Have One, won the 2014 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.
Kirsten Irving is one half of the team behind Sidekick Books. Her collection, Never Never Never Come Back, is published by Salt. Her commissions have involved Tyra Banks, the Tour de France, the Simpsons and the Hellfire Club. Left to her own devices she would probably write about robots all day. || @KoftheTriffids
Jemma L. King has read and published her work internationally. Her debut collection, The Shape of a Forest was shortlisted for The Dylan Thomas Prize, The Wales Book of the Year and The Roland Mathias Prize. She was also selected as a Scritture Giovanni Fellow for 2014. She won the Terry Hetherington Young Welsh Writer of the Year Award in 2011. She currently lives in north Wales.
Rose Lemberg was born in Ukraine, and lived in subarctic Russia and Israel before immigrating to the US, where she works as a professor of Nostalgic and Marginal studies. Rose’s prose and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Unlikely Story, Interfictions, and other venues. She edits Stone Telling with Shweta Narayan, and is currently reading for her first anthology of fiction-like writing, An Alphabet of Embers. Rose can be found at roselemberg.net, and on twitter as @roselemberg
Robin Lim is best known for her work as a midwife and founder of Bumi Sehat a non-profit organization in Indonesia. www.bumisehatfoundation.org ‘Ibu’ (mother) Robin heads Medical Relief and childbirth clinics in Bali, Aceh (post tsunami) and Dulag, Philippines (in the aftermath of the super typhoon Haiyan). Lim’s published books include: After the Baby’s Birth, Wellness for Mothers, Eating for Two... Recipes for Pregnant and Breastfeeding Women, Placenta the Forgotten Chakra, Eat Pray Doula, The Geometry of Splitting Souls (poetry) and many more in Bahasa Indonesia are available on-line. http://gaia-d.com/robin-lim-e-books/ Butterfly People, Ibu Robin’s Novel is available via Anvil Press in the Philippines: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/butterfly-people-1/book-E0prcsO_Yk6mRpSjZUrdcg/page1.html.
Éireann Lorsung is the author of Music For Landing Planes By (Milkweed 2007), Her Book (Milkweed 2013), and Sweetbriar (dancing girl press, 2013). Now she is at work on a novel about archives and earthquakes, pieces of which can be found in Two Serious Ladies, DIAGRAM, Mandala, and Bluestem. She directs Dickinson House (dickinsonhouse.be), a residency center for artists and writers in Belgium, edits the journal 111O and runs MIEL, a micropress (miel-books.com).
Hannah Lowe is a poet and prose writer. She has published two pamphlets - The Hitcher (The Rialto 2011) and Rx (sine wave peak, 2013). Her first full collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize, the Aldeburgh Fenton Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Prize for First Collection. Her memoir Long Time, No See is forthcoming in January 2015. She is a Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University, alongside studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.
Susan Mackervoy is a writer, printmaker and translator based in the Lea Valley, Hertfordshire.
Harry Man was born in 1982. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Atlas, The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood, Voicemail Poems and one has recently been taken to the surface of Mars with NASA’s Maven project. He lives and cycles around South London.www.manmadebooks.co.uk
Dawn Manning is a writer, photographer, and rogue anthropologist living in the Greater Philadelphia area. In addition to receiving the Edith Garlow Poetry Prize, her poetry has won the San Miguel Writer’s Conference Writing Contest and placed second in the 81st Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition for non-rhyming poetry. Her poems have been published through American Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Fairy Tale Review, Unsplendid and other literary journals. You can find out more about her work at dawnmanning.com.
Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. When not researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, she writes stories, found in Clarkesworld, Interfictions Online, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the anthologies Solaris Rising 3, Phantasm Japan and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014). One of her projects is poetry based on archaeological finds, to which ‘Her Sun-patterned Eye’ belongs. Others can be found in Stone Telling, Through the Gate and Mythic Delirium.
Richie McCaffery (b.1986) lives in Stirling and is busy finishing a PhD at the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Literature Department on the Scottish poets of World War Two. He also works as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the university. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Spinning Plates (HappenStance Press, 2012) and Ballast Flint (2013) as well as the book-length collection Cairn from Nine Arches Press (2014).
John McCullough’s first collection of poems The Frost Fairs (Salt) won the Polari First Book Prize for 2012. It was a Book of the Year for both The Independent and The Poetry School, and a summer read for The Observer. He lives in Hove, and teaches creative writing for the Open University and New Writing South.
Michael McKimm is the author of Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009) and Fossil Sunshine (Worple Press, 2013) and the editor of Map, an anthology of poems celebrating 200 years of geological mapping (forthcoming from Worple Press, 2015). An Eric Gregory Award winner, Michael has been an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa and a recipient of a Grants for the Arts award from Arts Council England. Find out more at
www.michaelmckimm.co.uk and www.writtenintherocks.wordpress.com
Lynn Pedersen’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in online and print literary journals including Cider Press Review, New England Review, Ecotone, Comstock Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Borderlands, Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Heron Tree and The Chattahoochee Review. She is a Pushcart Prize and Georgia Author of the Year Award nominee. Her chapbook, Theories of Rain (Main Street Rag, 2009), was a featured selection of the Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series. A second chapbook, Tiktaalik, Adieu, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2014 as part of their New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series.
Shelley Puhak is an American poet who lives in Baltimore. She is the author of two collections: Guinevere in Baltimore, selected by Charles Simic for the 2012 Anthony Hecht Prize, and Stalin in Aruba, awarded the Towson Prize for Literature. Her poems have appeared most recently in FIELD, Kenyon Review Online, Missouri Review, and North American Review.
Lesley Quayle is a poet and folk/blues singer, currently living in the wilds of deepest, darkest Dorset. A former sheep-farmer in Yorkshire, she has just completed her first novel and her current poetry collection Sessions (Indigo Dreams) was released late last year. Lesley plays the guitar badly, the bodhran and spoons with enthusiasm and is probably responsible for the recent upsurge in earplug sales as she learns to play the bones.
Lou Sarabadzic was born in France in 1986. Since 2008, she has lived in Ireland, Scotland and England. Whilst some of her French texts have been published in periodicals abroad, ‘La Chevelure: A Feminine Response to Baudelaire’ is her first poem published in English.
Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970. She is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove, (1932-2003). Her most recent publication is her Iota/Shots pamphlet, In The Snowy Air (Templar, June 2014). Unsent: New and Selected Poems 1980 – 2012, appeared from Bloodaxe Books in October 2012. In 2007 Shuttle was awarded a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry. Her 2006 collection, Redgrove’s Wife (Bloodaxe Books) was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best Single Collection, and for the T S Eliot Award.
Maria Stepanova is a poet, an essayist and a journalist. She was born in 1972 in Moscow and she has worked in various media outlets. She has served as editor of the internet publication openspace.ru and recently as editor of the website colta.ru. She has published nine poetry collections and has been awarded the Andrei Bely prize and a Brodsky fellowship. She lives in Moscow.
Chloe Stopa-Hunt was educated at New College, Oxford. Twice a Foyle Young Poet of the Year, she later won the University of Oxford’s English Poem on a Sacred Subject Prize, and in 2014, an Eric Gregory Award. Her poems have appeared in a range of journals, including POEM, Oxford Poetry, Envoi, Magma, and Ambit.
Diana Norma Szokolyai is a writer/performance artist/educator. VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts recently featured her in an article ‘Twenty Gypsy Women You Should Be Reading.’ She is Executive Artistic Director of Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, where she teaches and organizes writing and yoga retreats in France. Szokolyai is author of the poetry collections Parallel Sparrows (honorable mention for Best Poetry Book in the 2014 Paris Book Festival) and Roses in the Snow (first runner-up Best Poetry Book at the 2009 DIY Book Festival). The Brooklyn Art House Co-op digitized her handwritten chapbook, Blue Beard Remixed & Poems, written for The Fiction Project. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and has been published in The Boston Globe, Lyre Lyre, Dr. Hurley’s Snake Oil Cure, and The Highwaymen Annual Anthology #2 2013/2014, among others. || http://diananorma.com/; || @DNSWrites
Rebecca Tamás was born in London, and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her first pamphlet of poems, The Ophelia Letters, was published by Salt last year and shortlisted for a Saboteur Award. She is currently at work on her first collection. You can find her at @RebTamas.
Jeffrey Thomson is the author of four books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime, winner of both the 2010 Maine Book Award and the 2011 ASLE Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and Renovation. Birdwatching in Wartime is currently being translated into Spanish and Russian. His memoir, Fragile, and his translations of The Complete Poems of Catullus are forthcoming. In 2012 he was the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and in 2015 he will be the Hodgson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University and the Starr Center at Washington College. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
Jessica Traynor is a poet and creative writing teacher from Dublin. Her first collection, Liffey Swim, was published by Dedalus Press in 2014. She was awarded the 2014 Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. Poems have featured or are forthcoming in The Raving Beauties Anthology (Bloodaxe Books), If Ever You Go (Dedalus Press), Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, New Planet Cabaret (New Island), Peloton (Templar Poetry), Burning Bush II, Southword, The SHOp, The Moth, The Stinging Fly, and New Irish Writing among others. She was the 2013 Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year and won the 2011 Listowel Writers Week Single Poem Prize.
Tim Wells’ first dog was called Topper. His dad saved it from being put down after its original owner died.
Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese writes between English, Polish and Danish. Her plurilingual texts have been published in Metropoetica. Poetry and Urban Space: Women writing cities (Seren, 2013), Shearsman, Modern Poetry in Translation, Cordite Poetry Review, Dusie and Cegła. Her translations of contemporary Polish poetry appear regularly in journals and anthologies; they have featured on the London Underground. Salt Monody is her selection from Marzanna Kielar (2006); Nothing More (Arc, 2013) samples Krystyna Miłobędzka. As a Fulbright scholar, she examined Elizabeth Bishop’s archives: Cognitive Poetic Readings in Elizabeth Bishop: Portrait of a Mind Thinking (2010). She is a contributing editor at Poetry Wales.
Cecilia Woloch is an NEA fellowship recipient and the author of six collections of poems, most recently Carpathia (BOA Editions 2009), which was a finalist for the Milton Kessler Award, and Tzigane, le poème Gitan (Scribe-l’Harmattan 2014), the French translation of her second book, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem. The founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop, she has also served on the faculties of a number of graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs and currently teaches independently throughout the U.S. and around the world.