Events

Three Kent poets.

Fiona Sinclair is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in Bottle; new collection is Second Wind (Dempsey and Windle, 2022); other collections include The Time Travellers' Picnic; and A Talent for Hats.

Nancy Charley has poetry collections published with Smokestack books and Hercules Editions. Her poem Running is in Departures.

Maggie Butt has published six collections, including Ally Pally Prison Camp and Degrees of Twilight. She is a member of Poets for the Planet, and has published two novels: The Prisoner's Wife and Acts of Love and War.

Born in Kent, where he still lives, Robert Selby edits the literary journal Wild Court and reviews for various publications. His debut collection was The Coming-Down Time (Shoestring Press, 2020). The Kentish Rebellion, a book-length sequence, appeared from Shoestring in July 2022.

Declan Ryan's first collection, Crisis Actor, is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in 2023. His reviews and essays have appeared in journals including New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer, Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books and New Statesman. Declan lives in London.

Louisa Campbell lives in Kent. She worked as a mental health nurse for many years before she began to write in her fifties. Beautiful Nowhere (Boatwhistle Books, 2021) is her first full collection; her poems have won numerous competitions, and been widely published in literary magazines. She has two published pamphlets: The Happy Bus (Picaroon Poetry, 2017), and The Ward (Paper Swans Press, 2018), and was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem.

She will be joined by Rosie Johnston, whose four poetry books are published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast with Six-Count Jive most recently, in March 2019, and Jake Nathan, poet, writer and rapper.

A former runner-up in the Ginkgo Prize for Eco Poetry, Julian Bishop has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and featured in 2020 pamphlet Poems For The Planet. He's recently had poems in Magma, The Morning Star, XR's Rebel Talk, Riptide Journal and Finished Creatures magazine. We Saw It All Happen (Fly on the Wall Press, 2023) is his first collection.

Christopher Horton's chapbook, Perfect Timing, was published by tall-lighthouse in 2021. His poems have appeared in many poetry journals and in anthologies with Penned in the Margins, Broken Sleep Books and Days of Roses. He was a prize winner in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Prize, amongst others, and was shortlisted for the Canterbury Festival Poetry of the Year Competition in 2022.

Jessica Taggart Rose is a found member of Poets for the Planet. Her poems have been published in Letters to the Earth, Storm Chasers and New Contexts anthologies, Confluence Magazine, Full House and Three Drops from a Cauldron.

Written between 2015 and 2020, Walk Song (Shearsman Books, 2022) weaves in and out of the Refugee Tales project, of which David is a co-organiser. His other collections include All Through and Just.

David Herd is Professor of Modern Literature at University of Kent; his work focuses on the intersection between literature and human rights.