Ten Poets Charm the Pants Off Ten Historical Figures

Kirsten Irving is a Lincolnshire-born, London-based poet and editor. Her work has been published by Salt, Happenstance and Guillemot, widely anthologised and thrown out of a helicopter. She has won the Live Canon International Poetry Prize, judged competitions, and taught courses on folklore in poetry, and currently edits for First Story. Jon Stone is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher. He won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and his debut collection, School of Forgery, (Salt, 2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has written several shorter poetry books and a monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames (DeGruyter, 2022). He teaches writing and publishing at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. From https://pennyboxall.wordpress.com: Penny Boxall is the author of three poetry collections: Ship of the Line, Who Goes There? (Valley Press, 2018) and, with woodblock artist Naoko Matsubara, In Praise of Hands (Ashmolean Museum, 2020). She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, the Mslexia/PBS Women’s Poetry Competition 2018, and a 2019 Northern Writers’ Award. She is a Royal Literary Fund Bridge Fellow, working with sixth-form students in schools in Oxford and surrounding areas. She was the 2022/3 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, following two years as the RLF Fellow at the University of York. In 2019 she was Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, University of Oxford. In July-August 2023 she was UNESCO Cities of Literature writer-in-residence in Kraków, Poland. This followed a residency in City of Literature Tartu, Estonia, in 2022. She is currently working with Estonian poet Maarja Pärtna and sound-artist Liis Ring on a collaborative project for Tartu European Capital of Culture 2024, alongside an installation of poems in hiking cabins along the Nordlandsruta for Bodø Capital of Culture (Norway). ‘Replaying the Tape’, her collaboration with palaeontologist Dr Frankie Dunn and percussionist Dr Jane Boxall, premiered in November 2023 in New York. She is completing a new poetry collection with support from the Authors’ Foundation, and is the 2023-2024 Writer in Residence at Wytham Woods, University of Oxford, working on a sequence of poems about soil and layers of history.Bio from https://www.morleycollege.ac.uk/staff/staff/rebecca-varley-winter:Becky Varley-Winter is teacher of Creative Writing and English Literature. She is the author of Dangerous Enough (forthcoming, Salt Publishing, 2023), BLOOM (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), Heroines: On the Blue Peninsula (V. Press, 2019) and Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature (Sussex Academic Press, 2018). She’s also been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and Eric Gregory Awards, winner of T. R. Henn and Brewer Hall prizes for poetry.Helen Bowell is a London-based writer. Her debut pamphlet The Barman (Bad Betty Press, 2022) was selected as the Poetry Book Society Summer 2022 Pamphlet Choice. She is currently working on Bi+ Lines, an Arts Council England funded project involving workshops and the first anthology of bi+ poets in English. Helen is also a co-director of Dead [Women] Poets Society, a live literature organisation which "resurrects" women poets of the past, and which completed an Arts Council England funded national tour 2019-21. Bio from https://richardskinner.weebly.com/patrick-davidson-roberts.html:Patrick Davidson Roberts was born in 1987 and grew up in Sunderland and Durham. He was editor of The Next Review magazine 2013 – 2017, and is a contributing editor to The Poetry Archive, as well as co-founder and co-editor of Offord Road Books. In 2016 he was nominated for the Melita Hume Prize. He lives and works in London.Vasiliki Albedo lives in Greece and has worked with fuel cell technology, as a children’s entertainer, in the daycare centre of a psychiatric hospital, and for NGOs promoting green technology in developing countries . In 2017 she placed second in the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre competition (EAL), and won joint third place in the Brian Dempsey Memorial prize. She’s been nominated for Pushcart prizes and her poems have appeared in magazines, anthologies and newspapers. Swithun Cooper was born in 1983 and graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme. He lives in London. Swithun’s creative work has appeared in magazines including Acumen, The London Magazine and PN Review. In his spare time he puts on events with the feminist collective Manifesta. Bio from Ten Poets Charm the Pants Off Ten Historical Figures, in the style of a dating app profile: Hello! I'm a feisty 64 years-old - [but as a poet's 'birth-date' is calculated from when they wrote their first fully-realised poem, actually about 25] - obsessed with Mina Loy and Doc Halliday and love nothing better than a Situationist dérive in Penge for two. I'm happily married with two grown-up daughters, so am looking for an eidolon 'on-the-side'. As an eidolon you would preferably channel the energies of Julia Kristeva and Claudia Cardinale, only appear in the afternoon, and take strong coffee. I know you're out there. Make a move!From https://www.imogenrobertson.com:Imogen is a writer of historical fiction. Now based in London, she was born and brought up in Darlington and read Russian and German at Cambridge. Before becoming a writer, she directed for TV, film, and radio. She is the author several novels, including the Crowther and Westerman series. Imogen was shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award 2011 and the CWA Dagger in the Library Award 2012.From https://theinterpretershouse.org/jeffcoat-81:Rachel Jeffcoat is a Hampshire-based poet whose work has appeared in publications including Atrium, Humana Obscura and Tears in the Fence, and is forthcoming in New Welsh Review, Under the Radar and Off the Chest's Spaces of Significance anthology. Her pamphlet ‘Moult’ was recently shortlisted for publication by The Emma Press.Tom Bland is the author of the pamphlet Death of a Clown (Bad Betty Press, 2019), and the collection Camp Fear (Bad Betty Press, 2021), the latter described as: 'luxuriously subversive: both inviting the reader to explore the dark corners of the human psyche, and challenging the boundaries of contemporary poetics, fusing poetry with satire, surrealism and psychoanalysis… If the id, ego and superego met at a fetish club, it would look something like this.'