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Nine Pens Poets
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HLR (she/her) is a prize-winning working-class poet and professional editor from North London. She is a commended winner of the National Poetry Competition 2021, and she won the Desmond O'Grady International Poetry Competition 2021. Her debut full-length collection History of Present Complaint (Close to the Bone) was longlisted in the Poetry Book Awards 2022.
She is also the author of micro-chapbook Portrait of the Poet as a Hot Mess (Ghost City Press), and is currently writing her next poetry collection, Anatomy of a Disordered Personality. HLR's work focuses on her lived experience of chronic mental illnesses, and explores themes of complex trauma, addiction, and grief. Read more of her work at www.treacleheart.com and find her on Twitter @HLRwriter.
Susanna Galbraith (she/her) is from Belfast. She is an editor of Abridged magazine.
Her poems have featured or are forthcoming in The Door Left Wide: A Tribute to Eavan Boland (New England Review), Propel Magazine, Banshee, Channel Magazine, Cyphers, Anthropocene, The Tangerine, Washing Windows Too, Her Other Language and others.
She received ACNI SIAP General Artist Awards in 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022, and won the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize 2021. She studied English at Trinity College Dublin and Art History at University of York. @susannaalice
Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her publications include fourteen poems, The Friday Poem, Demos Rising protest anthology (Fly on the Wall), Spectrum identity anthology (Renard), Under Your Pillow erotic anthology (Victorina) and 2022 Anthology (Live Canon). She has written features and interviews for The Guardian, the Huffington Post and DIVA magazine.
She holds a PhD from LSE's Gender Institute, and has been published widely on gender and popular culture (including by Routledge and in two contributions to IB Tauris' 'Reading Cult Television' book series'.).
Originally from the North-East of England, Deborah now lives in London.
Find out more here
Niall M Oliver lives in Derry, Northern Ireland, with his wife and three sons. He is the author of 'My Boss' by Hedgehog Poetry Press, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, Atrium, The Honest Ulsterman, Ink Sweat & Tears, Fly On The Wall Press, and others. Find out more here.
Karen Jane Cannon is a poet and author. She is a Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of Southampton, researching poetry and place. She has published two poetry pamphlets—The Curfew Bell (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2021) and Emergency Mints (Paper Swans Press, 2018). She was the winner of The Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2022, commended for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2021, shortlisted for The Bridport Prize in 2019, and a finalist in the Mslexia Poetry Competition 2017. Her novel Powder Monkey was published by Phoenix in 2003.
Philip Miller grew up in County Durham and lives in Edinburgh. For 20 years he was a journalist for newspapers including The Scotsman, The Sunday Times in Scotland and The Herald. His poetry has been published online and in print. His novels are The Blue Horse (2015), All the Galaxies (2017) and The Goldenacre (2022), with a new novel to come in 2024.
Julie-ann Rowell’s poem ‘Fata Morgana’, from Exposure her fourth collection, was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 20/21. She was also Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize Single Poem Category 2020 for her poem ‘Naked’. Her first pamphlet collection, Convergence (Brodie Press) won a Poetry Book Society Award. Her first full collection, Letters North, was nominated for the Michael Murphy Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in Britain and Ireland in 2011. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has been teaching and mentoring for eighteen years. Find out more here.
Jen Feroze (she/her) is a poet, editor and copywriter living by the sea in Essex. A former Foyle Young Poet, her work has appeared in publications including Spelt, Poetry Wales, Dust, Atrium and One Hand Clapping. Her lockdown poetry project 'The Colour of Hope' was published in 2020 and is raising money for Mind UK. She has guest edited anthologies for The Mum Poem Press and Black Bough Poetry, and will be appearing in a forthcoming Nines anthology with Nine Pens. 'Tiny Bright Thorns' is her first pamphlet. Find Jen on twitter @jenlareine and on instagram @the_colourofhope. Find out more here
Ahana Banerji is a first-year undergraduate student reading English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She is a three-time Foyle Young Poet. Recently, she was long-listed for the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry and the Fish Publishing Poetry Prize, judged by Billy Collins. In 2022, she was the youngest shortlisted poet for the White Review Poet’s Prize. Her work is forthcoming in Anthropocene and Zindabad Zine. Find out more here.
How To Decode Your Orange-Peel Fortunes, Alice Wickenden.
Alice teaches Renaissance literature at Durham. She has had a chapbook, To Fall Fable, published with Variant Literature and a memoir on Scouting and the body called Thriftwood with Broken Sleep Books. how to decode your orange-peel fortunes is forthcoming with Nine Pens Press. She is on twitter at @alicewickenden.
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Stephen the Phlebotomist, Nadia Lines.
Nadia is a 20-year-old poet living and studying in Cambridge, UK. She was a Foyle Young Poet of the year in 2019, and has won the Orwell Youth Prize and the Tower Poetry Prize. Her work has been published by The Mays Anthology, Epoque Press, The Keats-Shelley Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and perhappened, and extensively by The Young Poets Network. Nadia’s Foyle prize winning poem also features in Chris Riddell’s anthology ‘Poems to Save the World With’. She loves medieval mystery plays, instant noodles, and her dogs – Freddie and Smudge. Stephen the Phlebotomist is her debut poetry pamphlet.
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The Thought Sits With Me, Ruth Beddow.
Ruth is a London-based, Midlands-born poet who also works in local government policy. She was shortlisted for the New Poet’s, Plough, Prole and Teignmouth Prizes in 2021. Her work has been published by Wild Court, The Poetry Village, Prole, Write Out Loud and Ink, Sweat & Tears, among others. "The Thought Sits With Me" (Nine Pens, 2022) is her first pamphlet.
an othered mother, Jem Henderson.
Jem Henderson is a nonbinary queer poet living in Leeds, UK. They have an MA in Creative Writing from York St. John University and have been published in Civic Leicester's Black Lives Matter anthology, Streetcake, Full House and Dreich. Their ramblings and ravings can be found on twitter and instagram @jem_face and they are working on their first collection.
Fierce Scrow, Éadaoín Lynch.
Éadaoín Lynch is an Irish poet & researcher based in Edinburgh, whose work has been published previously in Icarus, The Kindling Journal, the Fawn Press anthology Elements, and also shortlisted for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and the London Magazine Poetry Prize. Éadaoín is lead and co-director of Re·creation, a queer poetry development project and anthology (launching June 2022 with Stewed Rhubarb Press). Find them online at www.eadaoinlynch.com and on twitter @eadaoinlynch.
Sagrada Familia, Helen Anderson.
Helen Anderson writes in a small town/large village on the North East coast of England. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Teesside University. Author of 'Piece by Piece: Remembering Georgina: A Mother's Memoir' (Slipway) and a poetry chapbook 'Way Out' (The Black Light Engine Room), her work has been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. As a bereaved parent and a widow, Helen is fascinated by the therapeutic potential of words. Although much of her poetry and prose explores serious themes, Helen loves to surprise people with dashes of dry humour, both on the page and in ‘real life’.
With My Lips Pressed To The Ear Of The Earth, Charlotte Baldwin.
Charlotte Baldwin works on a national project supporting young people’s mental health and as a creative writing tutor & dogwalker. As Gypsy Rose Poetry, she travels round London visiting people living in isolation to talk about their lives and write poems for them.
Her poetry has appeared in the Elements anthology from Fawn Press, The North, Under the Radar, Shearsman, Lighthouse and Tears in the Fence, among others. In 2019 she was featured in Islands Are But Mountains, an anthology of the best new contemporary poetry from the United Kingdom published by Platypus Press.
We Lost The Birds, Ben Verinder
Ben Verinder lives in rural Hertfordshire. In recent years his poems have been shortlisted or commended in a variety of competitions - including the Winchester, Wolverhampton, Bedford, Ver and Cheltenham Festival prizes - and have been published widely. His first pamphlet was published by Frosted Fire, the publishing arm of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, in autumn 2021. Ben is an amateur mycologist and the biographer of the adventurer and writer Mary Burkett. He is currently studying a Writing Poetry MA with Newcastle University.
Not Quite an Ocean, Elizabeth M Castillo
Elizabeth is a British-Mauritian poet, writer, indie-press promoter, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Paris with her family and two cats, where she writes a variety of different things, in a variety of different languages, and under a variety of pen names. In her writing Elizabeth explores the different countries and cultures she grew up with, as well as themes of race & ethnicity, motherhood, womanhood, language, love, loss and grief, and a touch of magical realism. Her writing has been featured in publications and anthologies in the UK, US, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East. Her bilingual, debut collection “Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras” is for sale on Amazon, You can connect with her on Twitter and IG as @EMCWritesPoetry, or on her website www.elizabethmcastillo.com.
Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, Julie Irigaray
Julie Irigaray is a Basque poet who divides her time between the UK and the Basque Country. Born and raised in the south-west of France, she writes about her native region as well as Paris, Dublin, Bologna and London, where she has lived. She teaches creative writing at City Lit where she facilitates poetry workshops for beginner and advanced levels. She is currently doing a PhD in English Literature on Sylvia Plath’s complex relationship with England at the University of Huddersfield. She is part of Voicing our Silences, a collective of poets who write about different or difficult materials and aim at raising awareness about these issues. Click here for more information.
These are not my dreams and anyway nothing here is purple, Michael Conley
Michael Conley is a poetry and prose writer from Manchester, UK. His poetry has appeared in magazines including Rialto, Magma, Butcher's Dog, Strix and Interpreters House, and his first pamphlet, Aquarium, was published by Flarestack. His work has been Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. His prose work has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize, and his collection of short stories, 'Flare and Falter', was published by Splice in 2019 and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.
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A Sky Full Of Strange Specimens, Olga Dermott-Bond
Olga is originally from Northern Ireland. She studied English at the University of St Andrews and is an assistant head teacher at a secondary school in Warwickshire. She has always loved reading and writing poetry, and over the past five years has been dedicating more time to her writing. She has two daughters, and motherhood has shaped and influenced many aspects of her work. Memory, social and political history and female identity spark her interest as a writer and are prevalent themes in her work.
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Gradual Reduction To Bone, Kali Richmond
Kali Richmond is a York-based poet, with much of her writing inspired by the surrounding Dales, Moors and North Sea, and their array of wildlife. She grew up in a council flat in the most densely populated borough of London but spent most school holidays with her grandparents in the North Pennines and the Cotswolds, inspiring a lifelong yearning for vast open spaces.
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After The Riot, Neil Young
Neil Young hails from west Belfast (1964 batch) and now lives in north-east Scotland. He worked as a labourer, kitchen-porter and stage-hand before becoming a journalist, going on to report from New York post 9/11 to the Gaza Strip. His publications include: Lagan Voices (Scryfa, 2011), The Parting Glass – 14 Sonnets (Tapsalteerie, 2016), Jimmy Cagney’s Long-Lost Kid Half-Brother (Black Light Engine Room, 2017), and Shrapnel (Poetry Salzburg, 2019). Neil is also founder of The Poets’ Republic magazine and Drunk Muse Press.
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Waldeinsamkeit, Liam Porter
Liam is a writer, poet, and digital marketer from Merseyside, now residing in Chester. His poems have been published in 192, Independent Variable, Bloom and a range of other spaces. He was the co-editor and lead host of the 16th year of In The Red - LJMU's poetry open mic night and annual anthology. He hopes his writing will provide an essence of calm and reflection in what is a very hectic world.
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After The Flood Come The Apologies, Naoise Gale
Naoise Gale is a poet from West Yorkshire whose first pamphlet, ‘After the Flood Comes the Apologies’, will be published with Nine Pens in October 2021. She has been shortlisted in the Creative Futures Writers Award 2021 and longlisted in the Fish Poetry Prize 2021, as
well as various other poetry and flash fiction competitions. Her work focuses on mental
health, identity and addiction; it has been widely published in magazines such as Anti Heroin Chic, Versification and Opia Lit. She regularly attends Todmorden Writers’ Collective open mic nights. You can find her on twitter as @Naoisegale13.
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They Spoke No English, Stephen Keeler
STEPHEN KEELER is originally from the north-east of England. With degrees and teaching qualifications from the universities of Durham, Leeds and London and the Royal Society of Arts, he spent almost forty years in international language education living an working in Sweden, China and Vietnam and in most of the former Soviet bloc republics of eastern Europe, for the British Council, the United Nations and the BBC World Service among others.
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Vocation, Yasmin Djoudi
Yasmin Djoudi works across poetry and performance. She lives in London. She is new to all of this.
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