Recusant Contributors

Leah Armstead was born in 1956. She has worked formerly as a poetry editor and poetry workshop facilitator in schools, nursing homes, and mental health drop-ins; an English teacher; medievalist and researcher into women's history; rape crisis counsellor; mental health project worker among other occupations. She has won prizes in both the US and UK and has had numerous poems and articles published in, among others: 13th Moon, Red Read, The Big Issue, Cyfarfod, Louisiana State Poetry Society Competition Journal, Community X-Press, Greenwave Magazine, Matriarchy Studies, Women and the Book (Oxford University Press), Pendulum, In Sync, Ragged Raven The Machineries of Love Anthology, Leaf Poems Anthology (2008), Earlyworks Web Competition (2007), Wells Literature Festival, commended (2006), Welsh Poetry Competition, commended (2007). She lives in Wales.

Sebastian Barker, b 1945, lives in London. Guarding the Border: Selected Poems (Enitharmon 1992), The Dream of Intelligence (Littlewood Arc 1992, a long poem based on the life and works of Friedrich Nietzsche). Chairman of The Poetry Society between 1988-1992. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997. Elected editor of The London Magazine in 2002. Damnatio Memoriae: Erased from Memory (Enitharmon 2004), The Matter of Europe (Menard 2005), and The Erotics of God (Smokestack 2005). Sebastian Barker reading from his Poems (The Poetry Archive 2006).

Brian Beamish was born in Devon in 1974. He graduated in Theology from the College of St Mark and

St John, nr Plymouth. He currently lives entombed in legion tomes with a pet theramin in Ealing, London, where he works for BT in order to keep himself in poetry and contemplation.

Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theatre director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn’t earn a living in the theatre. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver. His poetry has been published in about as many journals as the alphabet will permit, in the US, UK and elsewhere. His chapbook The Conquest of Somalia is forthcoming with Cervena Barva Press. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. He currently lives in New York City, where he writes fiction and his short stories,

publishing in numerous literary magazines.

Jane Bellis was born in Wrexham, North Wales, on 8th July 1980. She has lived in Barcelona, Lisbon

and Liverpool over the past ten years teaching English as a Foreign Language. More recently, she

has worked as a Youth Guidance Officer with unemployed teens. She won a competition with Capsica Publishing in their Mersey Minis Series about Liverpool. They published a short piece Bellis wrote in a volume called Longing last year. So was also published in an underground independent fanzine called Slacker, based in Liverpool.

Leon Brown was born in Dorset in 1973. He has worked as an English Literature teacher and in TEFL at home and abroad including Greece and Portugal. He has been involved in poetry and theatre groups in Brighton and London both in an acting and writing capacity. Recently he has completed his first novel, Future Perfect, for which he is seeking a publisher. He is currently engaged with writing his second, The Wrecker's Ball.

Abigail Clark was born 7th May 1983 in Camberwell, London. Freshly graduated from Norwich School

of Art and Design. She has lived in Cornwall surfing the waves and in Rouen rooting through antique markets. Her work has appeared in Norfolk Journal, Norwich Evening News and Now or Never. She has work coming out soon online in Gloom Cupboard and Ink Sweat and Tears ezines. Currently she works

at two manual jobs and presents a weekly radio show on Future Radio 96.9fm.

Alan Corkish is a writer from the UK. Originally from the Isle of Man he now lives in Liverpool where

he writes novels, poetry and short stories, and co-edits the radical poetry journal erbacce. He is the author of Glimpses of Notes (2006), an autobiographical poem written in what the author calls "fragmented text"; Corrupted Memories, a poetry collection; and Groups (2006), a novel.

Rico Craig's Eviction is an extract from a novel-in-progress. He was born in the 70s and lives in Sydney, Australia. This is his first published piece.

Bernadette Cremin has previously worked as a social worker, tea lady, sociology lecturer, TEFL teacher, bank clerk and waitress. This chequered and eclectic career path has invaluably enriched

her true vocation of poet and performer. Cremin has gone on to win a Year of the Artist award, an

Arts Council performance poetry bursary, and has been published widely in the UK and Eire. As well as solo commissions, she has collaborated with a music producer (State Art), a film-maker (Indifference Productions), a photographer (Project Poetry) and a geneticist (Promise or Threat, ACE). Two collections: Perfect Mess (Biscuit Publishing, 2006) and Speechless (Waterloo, 2007).

Rani Drew is a poet and short fiction writer. She has published in North American, UK and Indian poetry and fiction magazines. She is also a playwright. She has written stage and radio plays, and produced them in the U.K, China, Hungary, Spain and Macedonia.

Peter Dudink was born in the Netherlands. He is about to publish The Mad Knight of Love and War,

a book for young adults with POD Infinity Publishing. His work has appeared in Retort Magazine (Australia). In 2002 he published a selection from his MA thesis in the summer issue of New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship (Harry Potter Anti-Hero: From Mis-Education to Conflict Mismanagement). Dudink lives in Ontario, Canada. This is his first published poem. Website: www.deweydink.wordpress.com.

EGJ was born just outside Malmö, Sweden on 11 November 1981. She writes somewhere in between poetry and prose. Currently a full-time MLitt student in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, EGJ also has a Master of Letters in The Gothic Imagination from the University of Stirling. Texts have appeared in Ponton, Serum, Bard, The Turnip and From Glasgow to Saturn. She lives, now and then, around Stirlingshire, Scotland.

Caroline England has had some writing published in Transmission, Parameter, Pipeline, Chimera, Lamport Court, Peace and Freedom Press, nr1, Succour, Pen Pusher, Positive Words, Twisted Tongue, The Text, White Chimney and The Ugly Tree.

Chris Firth was born in a back-to-back, Girlington, Bradford, 1962, one of seven kids. Grew up in Bradford - a delinquent, gang-member teenager until discovered White Cloud King Fu at 15, which set me on the better path. English Degree via Sheffield Poly where Barry Hines was my creative writing tutor. Fiction publications include Miasma and Unexpected Pond (Route 1998, 2000), Electraglade

Tales (Skrev Press 2003) Branwell Bronte's Barber's Tale - (East Coast Books, 2005). For the last few years had worked soley on poetry, working with Shutter Books, producing poetry to accompany photographs in a three book series Whitby One Nine Nine, North Yorkshire One Nine Nine (Yorkshire Book of the Year 2007) and Teesway One Nine Nine. Currently working on a book of more personal and spiritual poetry, Sama Song from which these poems are taken. Some of the Sama Song poems were shortlisted in the 2008 UK Muslim Writers' Awards. Also playing double bass in the Arabic/Egyptian folk band Salam-UK Band while living with Deborah and son Jacob, and teaching English, in Whitby, North Yorkshire, UK. Websites: www.electraglade.com; www.salamukband.co.uk

Naomi Foyle is a Brighton-based poet and performer. Her poetry has been published widely in journals including Ambit, The London Magazine, PN Review, Poetry London, Tears in the Fence among others. Solo publications: Red Hot & Bothered (Lansdowne Press, 2003), Canada (Echo Room Press, 2005), Febrifugue (Treeplantsink Press, 1996), and a libretto, Hush: An Opera In Two Bestial Acts (Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto, 1990). Her first full volume, The Night Pavilion, is forthcoming from Waterloo Press (2008).

David Francis is a singer-songwriter based in New York. In 2007 David released Poems, a CD of poems with music. This year he published verse in Pennine Platform and Lucid Rhythms, and an article on the difference between song lyrics and poems in BigCityLit. David will be on tour in England this September 2008. http://www.CDBaby.com/all/davidfrancis 

Simon Freedman was born in 1978 in Malta. He moved to the UK to study for a BA in Philosophy and

has lived here ever since. Poetic influences are various and eclectic, however key ones include Elaine Feinstein, WH Auden, Philip Larkin and Stephen Spender. His poetry has previously been published in

The Beat. Website: www.myspace.com/simonfreedman.

Michael George Gibson was born and raised in Sussex. He was brought up both in a Sussex country parish and The Community of Saint Hilda, founded by his father in South London in the 1930s. His secondary education was at the Durham School, where he was a King’s Scholar. He took a General Batchelor of Arts Degree of the London University in English Literature, Psychology and Aesthetics. After a few years teaching in Colleges of Further Education - mainly in Wormwood Scrubs Prison - he became a gardener and landscape gardener. His particular interest and speciality is in the rhythmical nature of English poetry. Website: www.michaelgeorgegibson.org

Ben Hall was born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1972 but spent much of his childhood in Hong Kong,

where his architect father designed vast public housing projects and his mother worked as a nurse in

a transit camp for Vietnamese refugees. After returning to England he studied Archaeology at the University of York in the same class as James Morrison (see below). This left him without a single marketable skill and almost unemployable for the next ten years. In this period he wrote desultory articles for Bristol's Venue magazine, one of which was printed. He has since followed in his mother's footsteps and retrained as a nurse. He currently works in an intensive care unit in West Sussex. Website: http://benicek.livejournal.com

Marc Harris was born in 1962 in Cardiff. He spent thirty years living in England, but returned to Cardiff in 2000. He has had poems published in many literary magazines including Agenda, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The New Welsh Review  and Envoi, Confrontation, (New York). He recently read his poem ' Tony Blair's Schooldays', at The Wales Millenium Centre In Cardiff. He works with homeless people in the city of his birth.

Clare Hill was born in the West Midlands on 29th August 1978. She has written articles for Arts Disability Culture Magazine, Twisted Tongue, Multicultural and various websites and has written short stories for The Second BHF Book of Horror Stories, Twisted Tongue, Gold Dust, Writelink

resources, and others. She has had poetry published in Raw Edge, Twisted Tongue, Delivered and Trespass. Two mental health books, both published by Chipmunka Publishing – including Living Without Marbles. Hill participated in the Equal 2 New Writers' Development Programme in Birmingham, and has performed poetry at the Oasis Cafe Theatre, Borders bookshop, the Library Theatre, and in the middle of Birmingham town centre.

Jan Hill works as an Occupational Therapist at Mill View Psychiatric Hospital, Hove, where she facilitates the creative writing workshop alongside Alan Morrison.

John Horder has been publishing poetry and journalism since the early Sixties, his most famous collection A Sense of Being (the celebrated title poem from which has been read by Julian Glover on BBC 2 and published in the prestigious Poem for the Day Two anthology, ed. Andrew Motion) was published by Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press in 1969. John has also contributed many articles, reviews and obituaries to the Guardian throughout the years. A lifelong friend of Stevie Smith, he edited Greville Press’s pamphlet Stevie for the 2002 Survivors’ Poetry Stevie Smith event. His Collected Poems are forthcoming in 2009. Topical website: www.johnhorder.blogspot.com

Martin Jack has been published by Sentinel Poetry and in First Time, Great Works, Penumbra, Breakfast All Day, Poetry Monthly, by the Knoxville Guild of Writers in their Anthology of Journeys,

and by Waterloo Press in Eratica as well as in an introductory sampler of his work in 2004: Waterloo Samplers No. 5.

Spencer Jeffery was born in New Zealand in 1976. He lived in Brighton, UK, for several years, during which time he wrote and recorded songs with a local band. He has been writing poems and songs since his early twenties. His first poetry/lyric collection, Lost Lyrics of the Lowlands, was published in 2006. The poem published here originally appeared in Poetry Express magazine.

Simon Jenner was born in Cuckfield in 1959. Educated at Leeds, then Cambridge. A winner of a South-East Arts Bursary, and a recipient of two major Royal Literary Fund grants, he has also received a commission from BBC Southern Counties Radio. Jenner writes for Poetry Review, PNR, Tears in the Fence, The Tablet, Music on the Web and British Music Society. The first volume of his Selected Poems, About Bloody Time, was recently published by Waterloo Press. Since 2003 he has been the Director of Survivors’ Poetry. Jenner is also editor of the respected journal Eratica.

Laura Kayne was born in London on 5th August 1978. Laura has an MA in Creative and Critical

Writing from the University of Sussex. She writes both poetry and prose and is currently (slowly!) working on a novel. Her poems have been published in The New Writer and Aesthetica magazine as

well as online at Mosaic Minds and The Poetry Kit website.

Tom Kelly was born in Jarrow on Tyneside and now lives further up the Tyne at Blaydon and works

as a drama lecturer at South Tyneside College. He has written a number of plays and musicals for

The Customs House, South Shields, most recently I Left My Heart in Roker Park. His poetry and short stories have appeared on Radio Four and in many UK magazines including Stand, The Wide Skirt,

The Red Lamp, Penniless Press, and in a number of pamphlets. His volume The Wrong Jarrow was recently published by Smokestack.

David Kessel was born in Harlesden, London, in April 1947. He suffered a breakdown at 17 prior to medical school. With diplomas from the RCSP, he went on to practise as a GP in East London until his second breakdown put a halt to his medical career. In spite of his illness, David continued writing poetry and published The Ivy in 1989 (Aldgate Press; reprinted 1994). His poems have appeared in the Phoenix Co-Operative, Poetry Express and the anthologies Where There's Smoke, Hackney Writers, Outsider Poems, Bricklight – Poems from the Labour Movement in East London (Pluto Press, 1980) and Under the Asylum Tree (Survivors’ Press, 1995); and have been put to music by the EMFEB Symphony Orchestra in Owen Bourne’s score Hackney Chambers. The publication of O the Windows of the Bookshop Must Be Broken – Collected Poems 1970–2006 (ed. Alan Morrison, Survivors’ Press, 2006) proved a bestseller. A selection from this volume was recently published in a bilingual German-English volume, Außenseitergedichte (Verlag Edition AV, 2007).

Alan Morrison was born in 1974. His poetry first appeared in Don't Think of Tigers (The Do Not Press, 2001). Three chapbooks followed: Giving Light (Waterloo Press, 2003), Clocking-in for the Witching Hour and Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever (both Sixties Press, 2004). Morrison has appeared in over thirty

journals, most recently Cadenza, Cannon's Mouth, The Journal, London Magazine and Poetry Salzburg Review. He has been a featured poet in Poetic Hours and online at Strix Varia. Short stories and prose published in Headstorms, Seeker and The Taj Mahal Review. His volume The Mansion Gardens (Paula Brown, 2006) was nominated for the 2006 TS Eliot Prize and has been critically praised in journals such as The London Magazine and Other Poetry. His acclaimed play for voices, Picaresque, is currently in its second edition (chipmunkapublishing). His second volume, A Tapestry of Absent Sitters, is forthcoming from Waterloo Press. Morrison is Poet-in-Residence at Mill View Psychiatric Hospital, Hove and has been recently commissioned to run the Writers' Forum at St. Dunstans home for the blind and partially sighted. In the small hours he edits the Recusant, which he also founded.

James Morrison was born in 1971. After graduating from York University with a 2.1 in Archeaology,

he naturally trained as a journalist, at the University of Wales, in Cardiff. Former Arts and Entertainment Correspondent for The Independent on Sunday (2001-03), and Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Brighton City College (whose pinstriped politics and pyrhhic spin has inspired much of his dystopian fiction since), Morrison now freelances for The Independent and The Guardian and lectures

in journalism at Kingston Univeristy. He is a regular contributor to The Literary Review. He was shortlisted for the Writers and Artists Yearbook Novel Writing Competition 2007 with a sample from

his dystopian novel-in-progress, The Dwarf on the Scaffolding, and won a free manuscript appraisal from the Literary Consultancy. He also writes (often dystopian-inclined) short stories. He is brother

of Alan Morrison.

Jemma Murat was born on the 13th of August 1985 in North London, Finsbury Park. Her work is influenced by John Berryman and Pablo Neruda, as well as Elizabeth Bishop.

Jennifer Newbury was born on the 29th of March 1984 in Yeovil, Somerset. She has lived in Dorset most of her life. She studied at the Arts Institute in Bournemouth, where she gained a First Class Honours in Photography. Newbury writes graphic novels, short stories, flash fiction and novels, since the age of 7. Recently she worked at Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, but gave up because she wanted a less conventional future. Her ambition is to work and live in the woods, running an educational centre to help people lower their carbon footprint and live simply. She currently works part time in a sweet shop and volunteer for conservation groups.

Ashok Niyogi is an Economics graduate from Presidency College, Calcutta. He made a career as an

International Trader and has lived and worked in the Soviet Union, Europe and South East Asia in the ‘80s and ‘90s. At 52, he has been retired for some years and has been cashew farming, writing and traveling. He divides time between California, where his daughters live, Delhi and the Indian Himalayas.

He is increasingly involved in his personal spiritual quest and studies scripture. He has published a book of poems, Tentatively, and has been extensively published in print and on-line magazines and in chapbook form in the USA, UK, Australia and Canada.

Alistair Noon was born in 1970 and grew up in Aylesbury. He co-edits the magazines Bordercrossing Berlin and No Man's Land, and runs the annual Poetry Hearings festival in Berlin. His poems, reviews

and translations from German, Russian and Chinese have appeared in Magma, The Wolf, Mimesis, Litter, Shearsman, Oasis, Poetry News, Chimera, Cipher Journal, Intercapillary Space, Realpoetik, Softblow and Versal, among others.

John O’Donoghue’s journalism, poetry and fiction has appeared in The Observer, The TES, The London Magazine, PN Review, Ambit, Acumen, Orbis, Aesthetica and Poetry Express. Letter To Lord Rochester was published by Waterloo Press in 2004. His tribute to the Brighton poetry scene, The Beach Generation, appeared with Pighog in 2007. His first full volume, Brunch Poems, is forthcoming from Waterloo Press in 2008. His memoir, Sectioned, is to be published by John Murray next February.

Mick Parkin was born in Yorkshire in 1957. He graduated in 1978 with a Degree in Engineering from Newcastle University. He worked as a bricklayer till 1987. Between 1990-95 he was a stand-up comic and performance poet, in London. He moved to Glasgow in 1995, and since then has been teaching creative writing to sixth form students in schools throughout Scotland and Ireland. He has no academic qualifications as a writer or teacher. He lives in Spain where he has been since 1990.

Patrick Reen was born in 1986 in Port Elizabeth (now, Nelson Mandela Bay), South Africa. He is a third year undergraduate student at the University of Cape Town. This is his first published poem.

Philippa Rees was born and brought up in Southern Africa, where as an only child she accompanied her grandfather on safaris inspecting African schools in remote territories for weeks at a time. Something of that experience colours all her writing; solitude is explored through most of her characters, whether through their inner spaces of courage, or the ostracism directed at unorthodox convictions. Married with four adult daughters, after sojourns in Mozambique, Germany and Florida, she now lives in Somerset, England. Between constant writing she has converted a collection of barns to provide a performing space for young classical musicians. Rees's poetry novel A Shadow in Yucatán (Trafford Publishing) is available at the following link: www.trafford.com/06-1520.

Sally Richards' poetry has appeared in the journals Awen, Carillon, Cauldron, Countryside Matters, Country and Border Life, Dogma Publications, Earlyworks Press, Monomyth, Poetry Express,

The Shropshire Star, Splizz, The Strix Varia, Touchstone, Warminster Community Radio (WCR) (featured poet). She has been shortlisted in the Earlyworks Press 2006 national poetry competition and was subsequently published in Routemasters & Mushrooms (Earlyworks Press 2006 winner’s anthology) and won third prize for her poem ‘Steep Hill’ in the Carillon magazine 2007 Open Poetry Competition. She has a regular poetry column in Country and Border Life magazine. Her publications include (with Steve Mann) Waiting for Gulliver (Caradoc Publications 2005) and (solo) Stained Glass, recently published by Survivors' Press as part of their national mentoring scheme, was launched at the Old Market Hall Cafe Bar in Shrewsbury this October and at the Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden this November.

Colin Robinson was born in Manchester on 7 March 1953. He emigrated to Australia in 1962. A writer and social activist, in Australia he was well known for his social justice statements and reports on issues such as homelessness, mental illness and poverty. Some of his poems were published in journals such as Meanjin, Mattoid and Poetry Australia. Since returning to England five years ago he had poems accepted by Poetry Scotland, Aesthetica and Ancient Heart amongst others. Robinson is currently working on a book on the experience of homelessness in contemporary Britain, for which he will be visiting towns up and down the East Coast line between London and Edinburgh to gather material. Robinson is also currently working for a charity called Barka who are involved in assisting their homeless compatriots in Britain.

Pauline Rowe has had two pamphlets of poetry published, the latest being Playing Out Time

(Driftwood, 2005). She has had work published in Smoke, The Rialto, Orbis, Iota, Smith’s Knoll and

many more. She has written a libretto for composer Dominic Gannon’s cantata – Benares (2005) and

a poetry film for Nothing Rhymes with Poets (First Take, 2006).

Philip Ruthen's creative non-fiction ebook One Hundred Days War is due to be published by chipmunkapublishing, and a first collection of poetry is proposed for publication with Waterloo Press

in 2008/09. He contributes reviews to The Poet's Letter and recently volunteered as a mentor for Survivors' Poetry.

Kevin Saving was born and still lives in the Home Counties market town of Winslow. He has worked in the caring professions all his adult life and trained as a psychiatric nurse at the University of Northampton. He has self-published two chapbooks, A Brand of Day (1994) and Rough Bearings (2005). His work has been published in such diverse outlets as Poetry Express, The Independent on Sunday, Krax, Poetry Review and by The Happenstance press. His poem, 'Dog Otter', won third prize in the 2006 National Poetry Competition.

LB Sedlacek was born in Lenoir, NC (USA) in 1970. Poetry has appeared in a variety of publications such as Word Riot, Passport Journal, Heritage Writer, sidereality, Bear Creek Haiku, Down in the Cellar, Open Mouse, Transparent Words, Inkburns, Poet's Canvas, Spiky Palm, X Magazine, ReVerb, HazMat Review, 3Lights, and ART:MAG. Her chapbooks include Alexandra's Wreck and Average Bears. LB is co-host of the podcast Coffee House to Go.

Sam Silva lives in North Caroline, USA. His poetry has appeared in legion journals including Samisdat, Sow's Ear, The American Muse, St. Andrews Review, Dog River Review, Third Lung Review, Main St. Rag, Charlotte Poetry Review, Parnasus, Rio Del Arts, Megaera, Big Bridge, Comrade Magazine, Ken Again and at least thirty others. Nine chapbooks published by Third Lung, M.A.F., Alpha Beat and Trouth Creek presses. These chapbooks were well received in newspaper reviews by Shelby Stephenson, Ron Bayes, Steve Smith, and the late poet laureate of North Carolina Sam Ragan, and solicited by Brown and Yale Universities for their libraries. Silva has a full length collection of poetry called Eating and Drinking based on a royalties contract signed with Bright Spark Creative. Sam Silva's Selected Poems 

is now available at: http://www.lulu.com/content/3645409

Serena Spinello is 26 years old, born and raised in New York. She currently resides on Long Island where she is completing an MA in English. Her recent poems have been published in Clockwise Cat, The Houston Literary Review, Conceit Magazine, 63 Channels, Sien en Werden, The Centrifugal Eye, Cause and Effect, Mississippi Crow, Lachryma: Modern Songs of Lament, Zygote in my Coffee, Hecale, Scorched Earth Publishing, The Flask Review and The Verse Marauder.

Geoff Stevens was born in the industrial Black Country of England in 1942. He started writing poetry in the 1970s and as since been widely published. He has been editor of Purple Patch poetry magazine since 1976. His current collection is Absinthe on Your Icecream from Poetry Monthly Press, his current CD Live in the Studio. Website: www.geoffstevens.co.uk.

Peter Street was born in England 1948. He left school epileptic and barely able to read and write. To date has had three collections of poetry behind him: Out Of The Fire (Spike Books, 1993) (a Forward Nomination), Still Standing (TowPath Press, 1998), Trees Will Be Trees (Shoestring Press, 2001). In 2006 Peter was commissioned to write poetry for a Tony Bevan Catalogue, a way in, to Tony's paintings. His poetry has also been seen on television in Germany, Holland and here in England on both ITV and BBC. Waterloo Press will be publishing his New and Selected Poems in 2008. He lives and works in Atherton, Lancashire.He was the recent reipient of a grant from the Royal Literary Fund.

Ray Succre was born in 1976, on Bastille day, in California. He currently lives on the Southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He has been published in Aesthetica, Nthposition, and Coconut, as well as in numerous other publications across as many countries. His influences include Milton, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman and Hart Crane.

Barry Tebb was born in Leeds in 1942. He studied English at Leeds Training College and sat at the

feet of a series of Gregory Fellows in Poetry at the University of Leeds including Martin Bell, Peter Redgrove, Jon Silkin and David Wright. His first collection The Quarrel with Ourselves was praised by John Carey in The New Statesman and he appeared in Children of Albion (ed. Michael Horovitz), and

in Three Regional Voices alongside Michael Longley and Ian Crichton-Smith. He edited Five Quiet Shouters which included work by the then unknown Angela Carter. In 1995 he founded Sixties Press

and has edited the magazines, Literature and Psychoanalysis, Leeds Poetry Weekly and Poetry Leeds. He has published a novel, The Great Freedom, an autobiography, Dancing to Nobody’s Tune, and several collections of poetry including two selected volumes and a Collected Poems.

Xelís de Toro was born in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, in 1962. He is one of the leading Galician novelists of his generation and has won various prizes and awards for his fiction. His novels include: Seis cordas e un corazón (tr. Six strings and a Heart; Xerais, 1989), under the pseudonym Roque Morteiro, Non hai misericordia (tr. There Is No Mercy; Positivas, 1990), Terminal (Positivas, 1990),

Os saltimbanquis no paraíso (The Saltimbanchi In Paradise; Sotelo Blanco, 1999), and The Corunna

Boats (Infantil E Xuvenil, 2005). Children's books include: O trompetista e a lúa (The Trumpeter and

the Moon; Edebá-Rodeira, 1998) and A máquina contacontos (The Storytelling Machine;

Edebé-Rodeira, 2000), which have been translated into several languages. de Toro has written extensively in academic publications on Galician culture. He was a founding member of the publishing house Edicións Positivas and directed its cultural magazine Anima+l. He writes for and performs with Rough Company, a collective of visual arts performers. He has recently edited a major anthology of short stories by Galicia’s leading writers, From the Beginning of the Sea (Foreign Demand, 2008), a project from the collective Boca2mouth, published in English. de Toro lives in Brighton, England, and

has lived in various areas of the UK since 1999.

David Trame was born in Venice, Italy, in 1953. He has been writing poems exclusively in English since 1993, many of which have been published in legion journalis including Poetry New Zealand,

New Contrast, Nimrod , Poet Lore , Dream Catcher, The SHOp, River Oak, Aesthetica, the Hurricane Review, Black Mountain Review, The Haiku Quarterly, Sierra Nevada Review, Event, Hawaii Pacific Review, Stand, Urthona Magazine, Orbis. His poetry collection Re-Emerging was published by www.gattopublishing.com in 2006.

Daniel Wilcox was born on April 24, 1947 in the very small town of Humboldt, Nebraska. He has a degree in Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach. He is a former activist, teacher, wanderer who has farmed in the Middle East and lived on an island in eastern Pennsylvania while working in a mental hospital during the Vietnam War. His writing has appeared in The Other Side Magazine, various poetry journals such as The Centrifugal Eye, Sentinel Poetry Online, The November 3rd Club, and Words-Myth. The Clockwise Cat published five of his political poems in November 2007. His short story about the Middle East, The Faces of Stone, appeared in the September 2007 issue of The Danforth Review. He currently resides on the California coast with his wife and son.

Gwilym Williams was born in 1948. He currently lives in the baroque city of Vienna, Austria. His

poetry has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, iota, Pulsar, Poetry Monthly, Current Affairs and

ink-sweat-and-tears as well as in the Ragged Raven Press anthology, The White Car. He has also reviewed for New Hope International and Pulsar. Currently Gwilym is working on his first soon-to-be-published (2008) collection: Genteel Messages.

Doog Wood's family has lived in Western North Carolina for over two-hundred years. His poems have appeared in Seam, Poetry Monthly, The New Writer and a recent anthology by Yarroway Mountain Press. He has read and lectured at Universities and Institutes in the United States, Europe, and North Africa. He lives and teaches in Dublin, Ireland.