Date/Time: Thursday 20 October 2022, 7pm to 8pm

Venue: Culture Lab, Newcastle University

Small presses are the lifeblood of the poetry world; bringing up new voices, supporting careers and breaking ground on the most important issues of our times. Three extraordinary poets get together to reveal all about this vital ecosystem and read from their new work.

Jane Burn is a poet and illustrator based in the North East. She has won many awards, including the Silver Wyvern at the Poetry on the Lake Festival and first places in the Wirral, PENfro, Bailieborough and Wolverhampton Literary Festival Poetry Competitions.  Her poems have appeared in anthologies including Writing Motherhood (Seren, 2017), #MeToo (Fairacre Press, 2018), and The Anthology of Illness (The Emma Press, 2020). Her work has been nominated for the Forward and Pushcart Prizes. She is currently completing an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University.

Jane Commane is editor and director of Nine Arches Press. She is co-editor (with Matt Merritt and Maria Taylor) of Under the Radar magazine. Her debut poetry collection is Assembly Lines (Bloodaxe Books, 2018) and she co-authored How to be a Poet, a creative writing handbook. She was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2017.

W. N. (Bill) Herbert is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University and is the author of nine collections of poetry, including The Wreck of the Fathership (Bloodaxe, 2020). He co-edited Strong Words: modern poets on modern poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) with Matthew Hollis, and Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012) with Yang Lian. Bill was Dundee’s inaugural Makar from 2013 to 2018. His collections have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Free event, and all very welcome.