Primers Volume Five

Jane Commane is a poet, editor and publisher. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, for a decade she also worked in museums and archives and in 2016 she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development programme Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, and is co-author, with Jo Bell, of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook (Nine Arches Press).In 2017, she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. In 2019, Jane was commissioned by Historic England and the Poetry Society as part of the Where Light Falls project to write a poem alongside community groups which was projected onto the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and viewed by over 15,000 people over three nights as part of a music, poetry and light installation. Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, teacher and activist. She is the author of nine plays, five chapbooks and five poetry collections. The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing But Naked Women (The Emma Press) won Best Collaborative Work at The Sabotage Awards. Recent collections from Nine Arches Press are All My Mad Mothers (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), Dad, Remember You are Dead and One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets. Jacqueline is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and teaches at The Poetry School. Her latest collection, Velvel's Violin (Nine Arches Press, 2023) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Krystelle Bamford’s poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review and a number of anthologies. Awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Raised in the US, she now lives in Scotland, completing a Creative Writing MLitt at the University of St Andrews and giving birth to two wee, radge kids. Born in Hong Kong, Claire Cox has an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University where she was awarded Blackwell’s Prize for best student. Currently a research student at Royal Holloway, studying poetry and disaster. Co-founder and Associate Editor of ignitionpress, her poems have appeared in Magma, The Butcher’s Dog and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Hannah Jane Walker is a poet, theatre maker and producer from Saffron Walden. She studied literature at the University of East Anglia and a poetry MA at Newcastle University. She is an associate artist at the National Centre for Writing and Cambridge Junction.