According to the boarding passes handed in at checkout…
Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has lived in Nottingham since 1985 where he runs the poetry publisher Leafe Press. Recent books include Riverrun, a series of modernist sonnets about the River Trent, and A Book of Odes.
Hongwei Bao 包宏伟 is a queer Chinese writer, translator and academic based in Nottingham, UK. He is the author of The Passion of the Rabbit God (Valley Press, 2024) and Dream of the Orchid Pavillion (Big White Shed, 2024) and Self-Portrait as a Banana (Poetic Edge, forthcoming in 2025). His poetry translation has appeared in & Change, Chinese Literature and Thoughht Today, Litter Magazine, Made in China, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Positions Politics, Samovar, Words Without Borders, and Writing Chinese.
Shaun Belcher…still smoking at back of the garage. Used to be a poet before the internet ruined things now is a wizard hiding behind a green curtain.
Kathleen Bell I’m mostly a poet. I’ve published two pamphlets: at the memory exchange (Oystercatcher, 2014) and Do You Know How Kind I Am (Leafe, 2021) as well as one full collection, Disappearances (Shoestring, 2021). I also write fiction and reviews.
Lucy Bellingham is the pseudonym of a writer, cineaste and activist whose public-facing role and complicated family background necessitates the use of a pseudonym. Lucy lives and works in the North East. She isn’t a fan of streaming and is building an eclectic collection of physical media.
Her film writing for Chainlink is her first published work.
Ross Bradshaw is the owner and manager of Five Leaves Bookshop (www.fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk)
Wayne Burrows has published poetry, short fiction, journalism and essays, delivered a wide variety of talks – from Further Adventures in Class & Contemporary Art (CAMP) to Decoding Monkey and Filmoteka (Nottingham Contemporary) – while working with organisations like Nottinghamshire Hospice, The Literary Consultancy, Place, Hatch and Backlit. Recent publications include Eastern Bloc Songs: Party, Pop & Politics (Centrala, 2018), Exotica Suite & Other Fictions (Shoestring, 2015), Black Glass: New & Selected Poems (Shoestring, 2015), The Holcombe Tarot (Limited Edition, 2014), Marine: A Story in Eight Objects (Nottingham Castle, 2013), and The Apple Sequence (Orchard Editions, 2011).
Andy Croft’s books include Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, After the Party, Forty-six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing, Bare Freedom and The Years of Anger. His plays include two Edinburgh Festival Fringe productions, Smoke! (2004) and Horty Porty (2005). Writing Residencies include the Great North Run, the Hartlepool Headland, Middlesbrough Town Hall, the Southwell Poetry Festival, the Combe Down Stone Mines Project, the Teesside Transporter Bridge, HMP Holme House and HMP Moorland. He ran radical publishing house Smokestack Press.
Dennis O’Donnell is 73 years old, a husband, father and grandfather. Former teacher and psychiatric nursing orderly. Shakespeare nut, though also addicted to the works of Raymond Chandler – which would account for his 23 novels (independently published) about West Lothian detective, Jack Black. He has had three books of poetry published in Scotland: Two Clocks Ticking (1997), Smoke and Mirrors (2003) and The Dossier on McQuarry (2022). This last couple collection also shows some Chandler influence.
Brett Evans lives, writes, and drinks in his native Gogledd Cymru. He is co-editor of the poetry and prose journal Prole.
Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016. In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press Sixteen Sonnets for Care came out in October 2022. His latest collection The Remaining Men has just been published by Cinnamon Press.
Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, where he still lives and works as a bus driver. He has four collections with Shoestring Press: No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere, Service Cancelled and The Point of the Stick; and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.
Owen Gallagher was born of Irish parents in the Gorbals area of Glasgow. He lives in London and worked as a primary teacher. His current collection ‘Clydebuilt’ (Smokestack Books) was short-listed for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, 2021. ‘The Lonesome Cowboys’ will be published by Salmon Poetry, Ireland, in 2025.
Cathy Grindrod (www.cathygrindrod.co.uk) has published six collections of poetry, the latest being Surrender, published by Five Leaves. She is a former Derbyshire Poet Laureate, also writes memoir and plays, and currently directs a programme of support for writers, The Writer Highway (www.thewriterhighway.co.uk). She recently received an Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice Award to work on a book of auto-fiction.
Martin Hayes was born in London and has lived in the Edgware Road area of it all his life. After leaving school at 15, he has worked as a leaflet distributor, accounts clerk, courier, telephonist, recruitment manager and a controller. He has worked in the same day courier industry for over 30 years and is the author of 7 collections of poetry including, When We Were Almost Like Men (Smokestack, 2015). The Things Our Hands Once Stood For (Culture Matters, 2018) Roar! (Smokestack, 2018), Ox (Knives Spoons and Forks Press, 2021), Underneath (Smokestack, 2021) and Machine Poems (Smokestack, 2025) In June of this year, he will have a New & Selected coming out with Broken Sleep Books.
Andy Hedgecock is a freelance writer and wanderer of Nottinghamshire’s post-industrial landscapes. A deserter from the ranks of Britain’s AI research workforce, he has (as revealed in his contribution to this issue) spent 65% of his working life in bullshit jobs.
His earliest reviews, essays and interviews – written in the 1980s – were published by the anarchist publications Freedom and The Raven. Since then, he has contributed to The Morning Star, The Spectator, Penguin/Time Out City Guides, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Conversations with Steve Erickson, Foundation, The Breaking Windows Anthology, Interzone, Black Static, The Third Alternative, Undefined Boundary and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice – for which he is also a peer reviewer.
Andy is currently fiction co-editor for the Morning Star and the regular interviewer for ParSec. His fiction has been published by Comma Press, the Morning Star and Popshot.
Ruth Hobson: Born in Nottingham in 1951 where I still live, work and write. I have been published for over thirty years by literary magazines and journals e.g. Ambit, Magma, London Magazine. The Wide Skirt, Theology Journal and Poetry London. I co-authored ‘Making Nothing Happen- 5 Poets explore Faith and Spirituality’ Ashgate, London, 2014. My first full length poetry collection ‘Arthur Talks’ was published in 2019 by Palewell Press. A pamphlet of Christmas poems ‘Starwise’ was published by Palewell Press in autumn 2023. My poem ‘Brigid’ won first prize in The Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition in 2024.
Anthony Howell is in Peter Reading’s words, “an eclectic original”: a poet and novelist whose first collection of poems Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. In the tradition of Robert Browning and Andre Gide, he often explores ‘immoralism’ in …continue reading at anthonyhowelljournal
Nick Ingram is a writer, artist, essayist, journalist, poet, publisher, creative workshop facilitator.
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist, recently given a Cholmondeley Award by The Royal Society of Authors . Her sixth Bloodaxe Books collection Constructing a Witch, is forthcoming in September. She edits Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches creative writing online for the UEA/NCW. A book of mixed media poems Hear What the Moon Told Me is published by KFS, and chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City by SurVision. She has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, Croatian and Greek for Versopolis. Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems (2023) is published in the US by MadHat Press. Her Poem ‘The Square of the Clockmaker’ has recently been riding the rails as one of the Poems on the Underground.
Graham Lock began writing poems in the 1970s. Then he spent the next 40 years writing about all kinds of music instead. Now he’s back writing poems again.
Edward Mackinnon studied modern languages at St John’s College, Cambridge and Warwick University. His four collections, The Storm Called Progress, Heartland Germany, Killing Time in Arcadia and Wising Up, Dressing Down, are all published by Shoestring Press. He lives in south-west France.
Roy Marshall’s books are The Sun Bathers (2012), The Great Animator (2017) and After Montale (2019). His new collection Light Work is due later this year. Roy lives in Leicester, where he works in adult education.
Alan Morrison is author of twelve critically praised poetry collections.
He is editor of The Recusant, www.therecusant.org.uk
and Militant Thistles, www.militantthistles.moonfruit.com.
He is an Associate Editor of Culture Matters, and also designs and typesets their books.
Leanne Moden is a poet, theatremaker and educator, based in Nottingham. She’s performed all across the UK and Europe, and her second pamphlet of poetry, Get Over Yourself, was published with Burning Eye Books in 2020.
Antony Owen is a writer from Coventry, the home of ska music and allegedly peace and reconciliation.
“POETUS” can refer to an abbreviation for President-Elect of the United States (PEOTUS), a creative persona like “Poetus Maximus” by poet Robert Bradley Jr., a term in Latin history, or even a brand like an interior design firm, but it’s often a stylized or unique name for a poet or creative project, such as in the context of the Latin phrase “Paete, non dolet” or specific online usernames/projects. The meaning depends heavily on the context, ranging from political acronyms to literary works or personal branding.
Fiona Robertson is a writer and occasional poet who has been exploring the inner realms for many years. She is the author of The Dark Night of the Soul: A Journey from Absence to Presence, and Eve Was a Realist: Poems for the Untamed Heart. She began writing poetry in 2013, and was a finalist in the Nottingham round of the 2019 UNESCO City of Literature Slamovision poetry slam. She was a participant in this year’s Pint of Science Creative Reactions, a science-meets-art collaboration. In 2019, she went back to the University of Nottingham forty years after starting her first degree and graduated with an MA in philosophy
Tuesday Shannon is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. In 2022 she completed a critical-creative PhD in contemporary poetry. Her poems often explore landscapes, physical and emotional, and have been published in PN Review, Wild Court, Left Lion, and others. Her debut pamphlet, The Rough Guide to Ilkeston, was published in 2023 and is available from Rack Press.
Caroline Stancer has a Creative Writing MA from Nottingham Trent University, and gained a place on Writing East Midlands’ Mentoring Scheme with Helen Mort.
She was longlisted for Primers 2020, the National Poetry Competition 2021, commended in Verve Festival’s Competition 2023 and shortlisted for Primers 2023.
She has been published in Otherwise Engaged, Litter Magazine, Ink, Sweat and Tears, the Nine Arches Press Blog, Like Flyering for the Revolution: The VERVE Anthology of Protest Poems and Anthropocene.
She has performed at Verve Poetry Festival, in a live stream for UNESCO City of Literature for World Poetry Day, at Nottingham Poetry Festival and many other events. She is studying for a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University and recently completed a novel.
Caroline co-runs the poetry collective and podcast, Dandelions Poetry.
Her poetry pamphlet Full Body Reclaim is published with Five Leaves Publications.
Andrew Taylor is a founder member of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Research Group, and poetics has appeared in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos (Salt) and Otoliths. He is co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. As poet-in-residence at Liverpool Architecture and Design Trust he undertook a residency at Liverpool Cathedral where poems and poetics were gathered in the pamphlet Cathedral Poems. He completed a PhD in poetry and poetics in 2008 and teaches English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.
Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet who has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes. She has been widely published including poems and reviews in The Guardian, Magma and The Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press).
Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His most recent books are Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023) and A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.
Angela Topping‘s ninth poetry collection, Earwig Country was published in 2024 by Valley Press. Her poems have won several prizes and appeared in a range of journals including Poetry Review, Magma and Stand. She is a former Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden.
Ross Wilson works full-time as an Auxiliary Nurse in Glasgow. His first collection, Line Drawing (Smokestack Books), was shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year in 2019. A second collection, Vital Signs, was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2023.
Gregory Woods is the author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry(1987), A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. His main poetry collections, of which Records of an Incitement to Silence (2021) is the most recent, are published by Carcanet Press. He is Emeritus Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University
