Guest Poet: Alyson Hallett

Alyson Hallett is a prize-winning poet and Hawthornden Fellow. Besides publishing six books and pamphlets of poetry, she has also written drama and an audio-diary for BBC Radio 4; an essay on Chalk for BBC Radio 3; drama for Sky Television and a book of short stories. Alyson was the first poet to be in residence in the Charles Causley house and also the first resident poet in a university Geography Department with a Leverhulme Fellowship. Alyson collaborates with artists, musicians and sculptors, and for the past 17 years has curated a poetry as public art project: The Migration Habits of Stones. Before writing full time, Alyson worked as a cleaner; postwoman; housekeeper on the Isle of Iona; mental health worker for MIND and the Richmond Fellowship. Her latest publication is a pamphlet of poems, Toots (Mariscat Press), recommended by Jackie Kay as one of her summer reads in the Sunday Observer.

Guest Poet: Julie-Ann Rowell

Julie-ann Rowell's first pamphlet collection, Convergence, published by 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. Her latest collection, Voices in the Garden, is a sequence about the life of Joan of Arc, published in 2017 by Lapwing Publications, Belfast. She has been teaching poetry and mentoring in Bristol for 10 years and has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. She's won several awards including first prize in the Frogmore Poetry Prize and the New Writer Poetry Competition Short Collection prize, and was a runner-up in the Bridport Prize, and in the Mslexia Poetry Competition (three times).