Carole Coates

Carole lives in Lancaster which she says is a good place for a poet to live. She began writing poetry in mid-life and has since published seven collections and two pamphlets. She's been placed in many competitions, winning first prize in the Nottingham Open Competition and second in the Mslexia Competition. She has been regularly published in journals, magazines and anthologies, such as the Forward Anthology. She was given a Yorkshire Arts Award. ‘I think Carole is a real one-off - I can't think of any poets that are doing quite what she's doing – her work is always ambitious and pushing the boundaries of not only what a poem can do but what a poetry collection can do' (Kim Moore)

Many of her books focus on specific themes or overarching narratives, told in sequences of poems. Her new collection Letters for John is a one-sided conversation with her dead husband, turning over questions and memories. She has already begun this in her previous book Dead Letters which Carol Ann Duffy describes as ‘a subtle meditation on body and soul'.

Jennifer Copley 

Jennifer lives in Barrow with her sculptor husband and cat Freddy. She doesn't write about either of them, mainly writes about her grandmother, ghosts and graveyards. She doesn't write about butterflies or sunsets either as they are not gloomy enough. Another late starter in poetry, she's published four collections, eight pamphlets and she won the Cinnamon Pamphlet Competition in 2018. She's been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies, including the Forward Anthology. She has won many prizes including the Faber/Ottaker prize for poetry. Her work has also featured in the GCSE Poetry Unseen Revision Papers.

Jennifer's work could be described as domestic Gothic. Everyday and sometimes quirky detail is used in her unsettling narratives which Kim Moore has described as ‘an alternate reality – one where we should expect the unexpected and where the border between the living and the dead is permeable'. Her latest publication is a pamphlet When the World was left in Pieces and her new collection The Woman and God will be out in 2027.

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Eliza Mood

Eliza lives in the North East and can be found tramping and cycling round Durham from rock crag to river-city to recovering coast. Another late starter, she is a poet and fiction writer whose novel O Man of Clay is a near future, speculative narrative about climate change, set in a flooded Hartlepool. Her poetry has been published in British and international journals and has lately been listed in several pamphlet and poetry competitions including Aurora, Bridport, Mslexia, Northern Writers and the National Poetry Competition.

Her new work is a poetry pamphlet It Rains in the Weather House, published by Hen Run. It glimpses generations of a family, their lives connected in varying ways with landscape, weather and industrial history – a grandfather who would ‘sooner pencil/fleet birds and fishes on his old school slate…grips rope/ in pit-dark, letting and shutting an air trap'. Eliza's poems combine a lyrical intensity with specific detail, original and beautifully unique.

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