Biographies
Tom Leonard was born in 1944 in Glasgow. Besides his collections of poetry for the page he has performed sound poetry in festivals in Britain and abroad. He has also written critical essays, political satire, a biography of James Thomson (1834-82), and compiled the anthology of forgotten West of Scotland nineteenth century poetry Radical Renfrew. One of Leonard's abiding concerns has been the political, hierarchical nature of language in Britain and his poetry is famous for its representation of Glaswegian working-class speech. He has been writer-in-residence at Glasgow and Strathclyde universities and Bell College of Technology. His collection Intimate Voices: Writing 1965-1983 shared the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 1984, but was at the same time banned from Scottish Central Region school libraries. It has recently been reprinted by Etruscan. In 1991 he published an analysis of the Gulf War along with a series of satirical monologues, On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, commonly known as The Gulf War, with Leonard's Shorter Catechism. A CD of Leonard reading his poetry, nora's place, was released by AK Press in 1996. Leonard presently teaches Creative Writing part-time at Glasgow University. A collection of poetry 1984-2003 Access to the Silence was published by Etruscan in 2004. Visit www.tomleonard.com
Peter Manson was born in 1969 in Glasgow, where he works for the Land Register. His publications include iter atur e (computer visuals, Writers Forum, London 1995), me generation (unclassified verbal and visual work, Writers Forum 1997), and Birth Windows (poems, Barque press, Cambridge 1999). Two Renga, written collaboratively with Elizabeth James, appeared in the Reality Street Editions 4-pack Renga + in 2002, and a prose work, Adjunct: an Undigest is forthcoming (2005) from Edinburgh Review. Between 1994 and 1997, he co-edited (with Robin Purves) eight issues of the experimental/modernist poetry journal Object Permanence. In 2001, the imprint was revived as an occasional publisher of pamphlets of innovative poetry, and has so far published work by the poets J. H. Prynne and Keston Sutherland. From October 2005 he will be the Judith E Wilson Poetry Fellow. His own website, Freebase Accordion, is at http://www.petermanson.com
Adrian Clarke. First published by Eric Mottram in the Poetry Review winter 1972-73 issue, Adrian Clarke resurfaced in the mid 80s with READING REVERDY and GHOST MEASURES from Paul Brown's Actual Size. Then began a long association with Bob Cobbing and Writers Forum which included co-editing AND magazine from 1994. Also co-edited FLOATING CAPITAL - NEW POETS FROM LONDON with Robert Sheppard in 1991, and with Virginia Firnberg formed the performance duo StrsS. Since Cobbing's death in 2002 has been running Writers Forum jointly with Lawrence Upton. His most recent collections are SKELETON SONNETS (Writers Forum, 2002) and FORMER HAUNTS (Veer Books, 2004).
Kelvin Corcoran's New and Selected Poems was published in 2004 by Shearsman. It combines selections from his previous nine books with two new complete works. An extended sequence entitled 'Helen Mania' was made a Poetry Book Society choice in 2005. His next book 'Roger Hilton's Sugar' will be published later this year.
Peter Larkin works as Philosophy & Literature librarian at Warwick University. From 1988-2002 he ran Prest Roots Press with its commitment to affordable fine press work. He has contributed to Reality Studios, Fragmente, Parataxis, Talisman, Shearsman, Inscape, Angelaki, Stand and The Gig. He appeared in the anthology Ten British Poets (1993). Among his published books are: Enclosures (1983), Pastoral Advert (1989), Scarce Norm Scarcer Mean (1992), Seek Source Bid Sink (1995), Three Conformities of Forest (1997), Landscape with Figures Afield (1998) and Parallels Plantations Apart (1998) A collection of 10 years' work, Terrain Seed Scarcity, was published by Salt Publications in 2001. Since then he has published Slights Agreeing Trees (2002) and most recently a chapbook-threesome from The Gig Publications, Sprout Near Severing Close, What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei, and Rings Resting the Circuit (2004). Recent work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Triquarterly, Fence and Ecopoetics. The latest text he has completed is Leaves of Field (extracts forthcoming in Shearsman, The Gig, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review).
Jaremy Hardingham. In 1997 Jeremy collaborated with eleven others to make theatre called incarnate, performing in the streets at night. Since then he is fortunate to have been helped through working with theatre companies Signal to noise, Shunt, Mapping 4D, & The People Show, amongst others, as a writer/performer, director and production manager. He now works for Escape Artists, a theatre company founded in a prison. Currently under development is a new incarnate project, I SHALL NEVER BE CLEAN, which seeks to bring together performances from people in violently different areas of life.
Nathalie Quintane, born in 1964, lives in Digne-les-Bains. She's published ten volumes since 1997, almost all with P.O.L. Press, that may be categorised alternatively as poetry, novel or document or theater (etc). Public readings essentially in Europe, North Africa, one in Brazil, none east of a straigh line connecting Madagascar to the Oural. A handful of sociological videos attempt a description of a small part of the contemporary poetic field. A music cd with artist Stéphane Bérard : "Progressistes" (al dante, 2002).
Eric Giraud, born in 1966, lives in Marseille, author and translator. Has published "Des tâches & des instruments" (Le Bleu du Ciel, 2003), "Marcel" (Le Rouleau Libre, 2000), "Des tâches & des instruments" (Contre-Pied, 2000), "Cliches" (Fidel Anthelme X, 1998). Has translated into French "Quitte ou Double" of Raymond Federman (Al Dante, 2004). Has translated with Holly Dye "Prises" of Lee Ann Brown (Format Américain, 2000), Charles Olson, (for Th. Typographique, 2000), critical texts by American writers for catalogues published by Al Dante press, as well as texts by Stacy Doris, Barbara Guest, Charles Reznikoff, Denise Riley, Jalal Toufic, Juliana Spahr (in journals, such as 'If', and in anthologies). He co-edits the journal 'Issue', linked to American poetry. He also co-edits the critical journal 'Cahiers Critiques de Poésie' published by the CIPM.
Born 1947, Michael Haslam has written all his extant poetry from Foster Clough, overlooking the Mytholmroyd and Cragg Vale, in the Calder Valley constituency of West Yorkshire. Acknowledgeable publications include: an early pamphlet, various ragged fringes (Turpin 1975); two self-publications, Continual Song and Aleethia (Open Township 1986 & 1990); Sothfastness (Poetical Histories 1992); Four Poems (Equipage 1993); a "Collected Poems" maregely written (i.e. reqritten) in 1994, A Whole Bauble (CArcanet 1995)l and the current project, The Music Laid Her Songs in Language (Arc 2001), and its 'second verse', A Sinner Saved By Grace, due out from Arc, June 2005.
Author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and criticism, Tony Lopez was born in 1950 and grew up in Brixton, South London, where he was educated at local state schools. He began working as a freelance on short stories for newspapers and magazines in the early 1970s and published five crime and science fiction novels with New English library between 1973 and 77, when he gave up writing fiction and went back to school. He had also been writing and publishing poetry in magazines, giving readings locally in London, and gaining some experience of small press publishing. He attended the University of Essex (BA 1980) and Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge (PhD 1986). During the 1980s he made a series of performance art events that were staged in Cambridge, Liverpool, Edinburgh, London and Amsterdam. His most recent books of poetry are Devolution (The Figures, USA) and Data Shadow (Reality Street, UK) both published in 2000. In 1990 he received a Blundell award from the Society of Authors for research on modern poetry, and in 1996/97 a Wingate Scholarship in poetry for his book-length sonnet sequence False Memory. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth where he was appointed the first professor of poetry in 2000.
Kaia Sand is the author of interval (Edge Books 2004); and an editor of the Tangent, a zine of politics in the arts, which includes a zine; a radio program (www.thetangentpress.org/radio.htm); and a chapbook/pamphlet series. She's most recently working on a manuscript called why this body decided to be left handed. She lives, writes, and teaches in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
Jules Boykoff lives in Walla Walla, Washington (USA) where he co-edits The Tangent, a zine of politics and the arts, co-hosts TangentRadio: Poetry & Politics , and teaches political science at Whitman College. He is the author of Philosophical Investigations in a Neo-Con Roots-Dub Styley (2004, Interrupting Cow Press) and Exit a collaboration with Kaia Sand (2002, The Tangent Press). His first full-length collection of poetry, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge, is forthcoming from Edge Books.
John Welch. Born 1942, lives in London. His latest collection,THE EASTERN BOROUGHS, appeared from Shearsman in April 2004. His three previous full-length collections are OUT WALKING (Anvil 1984); BLOOD AND DREAMS (Reality Street 1991), GREETING WANT (infernal methods 1997). Founded in 1975 a specialist poetry publisher 'The Many Press' which over the next twenty years published many books, pamphlets and broadsheets. Contributed an article 'Dream and Restoration', on the subject of poetry and psychoanalysis to 'Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991' edited by Denise Riley (Macmillan 1992). Other writings on his personal experience of psychoanalysis have appeared in 'The London Review of Books' and 'fragmente.' Articles on a variety of other topics have been recently appearing in 'The PN Review', 'The Reader', 'Scintilla' and elsewhere.
Alan Halsey's latest book is Marginalien, a collection of poems, prose & graphics 1988-2004, published by Five Seasons Press and including a CD-Rom of the text-graphic work Memory Screen which has recently been exhibited at the Bury Text Festival. He is the editor of West House Books.
Tadeusz Pióro (1960) was born in Warsaw and works at the English Institute of the University of Warsaw. He has published five books of poems in Polish. A selection in English, Infinite Neighbourhood, was published by Equipage in 2000. Most recently, he supplied some of the texts for Warszawa, an album of photographs of Warsaw taken by Marc Atkins and published by WIG Press. He is also the co-editor and principal translator of Altered State:The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, 2003).
Andrzej Sosnowski, poet and translator, was born in 1959 and works as an editor for Literatura na Swiecie. His translations include selected Cantos by Ezra Pound, selected poems by John Ashbery and Ronald Firbank's The Flower Beneath the Foot. He has been published in English translation in Altered State: The New Polish Poetry.
Vahni Capildeo was born in 1973 and came to England from Trinidad as a student in 1991. She was very happy to discover the freedoms and disciplines of Anglo-Saxon poetry at Oxford, which allowed to her to think about metre and rhythm in ways that did not tie down scansion to contemporary standard English. She also found a group of friends, notably including the Scotland-based playwright Sarah Colvin and the mediaeval musicologist Emma Dillon, who made her aware of the issues and possibilities of feminism, women's writing, and the singing/speaking voice. Her first book, No Traveller Returns (Salt Publishing, 2003), tells the story of the early part of this transition in a series of poems and prose poems divided into sections like chapters based on time, voice or place.
Maurice Scully was born in Dublin in 1952 & educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He has been editor of a number of magazines and chapbook series, and through the 80's organised readings and literary events. Among his books are 5 Freedoms of Movement and the recently published Livlelihood. Livelihood is a large work comprising 5 books and 3 interstices and is in turn the middle volume of a trilogy composed over the last 24 years or so. Parts of Livelihood have been published as separate books as The Basic Colours, Priority and Steps and the chapbooks Prelude, Interlude and Postlude.
Karlien van den Beukel was born in the Netherlands and raised in Trinidad. She completed her doctorate in dance and modernism at Gonville and Caius College. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in Angel Exhaust, How (2) and Poetry Review and she was guest editor of the Edwin Denby special issue for Jacket. Recently, she has translated the Dutch poets Tonnus Oosterhoff, Anne Vegter and Gerrit Kouwenaar.
Michael Kindellan was born in Toronto but lives and works in London.
Jow Lindsay grew up in South Africa and now lives in London. He is one of the editors of Bad Press
Nick Potamitis lives in London where he works for the British Film Institute National Library, He has taught Film Studies at the University of Warwick and is Visiting Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. In 2005 a manuscript of his poetry was shortlisted for an Eric Gregory Award.
Neil Pattison was born in Edinburgh in 1976. He studied in London before moving to Cambridge, where he is completing a PhD. With Sam Ladkin he runs Arehouse Press. His first pamphlet, "Placements", was published in 2005.
Colin Still is a producer/director who specializes in making films about poets & poetry. His work includes the acclaimed (?) Channel 4 series 'Arrows of Desire' & documentaries on William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka & Allen Ginsberg. He is also the producer of 'Rockdrill', a series of audio CDs featuring Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael McClure, Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth & Lee Harwood. In this session, as a celebration of Robert Creeley, he will be showing unedited rushes from a work in progress, provisionally entitled 'Shall we/& why not?'. This footage, shot in 2003, features Bobbie Louise Hawkins, the photographer Elsa Dorfman, the sculptor John Chamberlain (a friend of Creeley's since Black Mountain) & Creeley himeself, in an extended series of interviews filmed on location in his house in Maine.
Jérôme Game is a poet. He lives in Paris after a few years in the United-States and in England. Numerous public readings in France and in other countries. Working on a video-poem with Nebahat Avcioglu. He works as a Lecturer in philosophy at the American University of Paris.
Books (selection)
2005 Ceci n'est pas une liste, éditions Little Single
2004 écrire à même les choses, ou, Inventaire/Invention
2003 Tout un travail, Fidel Anthelme X
2002 Corpse&Cinéma, CCCP Press (Cambridge - U.K)
2001 Polyèdre suivi de La Tête bande, Voix
In journals (selection)
Quaderno, Boxon, Horlieu, Fusées, Doc(K)s, Java, Son@rt, Il Particolare, Issue et à paraître dans IF, Tinja, Mission Impossible, La Revue X, Canicula, è®e, Action Poétique, FPC, [h]apax, Chaoïd, Incidences.
Sound pieces (selection)
Quid CD 3, Cambridge, 2002
CD Boxon 13, 2003
Son@rt 40, 2004
Panoptic : un panorama de la poésie contemporaine CD-Rom Inventaire-Invention, 2004
Nebahat Avcioglu is a British visual artist born in Turky. Lives and works in Paris. Photographer, video artist, author of installations. Authors of essays in art history. Recent projections : ENSCI (Novembe 2004), Beaubourg (March 2005), CIPm (March 2005), Poéson festival Reims (April 2005), Musique Action festival Nancy (May 2005) and collective exhibitions : Lieu 3 bis f - Art Contemporain, Aix-en-Provence (2003). Videos in Mostra n°1, Incidences n°11, Revue x. Forthcoming publications : Bleu ériphérique and Somewhere out there airports (with texts by Jérôme Game)
Many thanks to the British Electronic Poetry Centre for a couple of the biographies. Visit http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/