Description
Tjawangwa Dema is author of an/other pastoral (No Bindings: 2022) and The Careless Seamstress (University of Nebraska Press: 2019), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Her chapbook Mandible was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets box set. She has received fellowships and residencies from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Danish International Visiting Artists programme, amongst others. Tjawangwa has given readings in over twenty countries and sits on a number of poetry festival boards. Her poetry has most recently been translated into a German collection with a Portuguese translation forthcoming.
Samantha Walton is a writer, researcher and editor based in Bristol. Her most recent book, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (Bloomsbury) is a work of nature writing and cultural history which explores the nature-wellbeing connection in the context of ecological crisis and late capitalism. Her poetry includes Self Heal (Boiler House Press), a collection of ecological lyrics, and Bad Moon (Spam Press), an ecogothic feminist horror story about the end of the world. She co-edits Sad Press and is Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University.
Caleb Parkin is the third Bristol City Poet. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016, the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017 and various other shortlists. Poems in The Rialto, The Poetry Review, Under the Radar, Butcher’s Dog, Coast to Coast, Strix, Magma, Envoi, Lighthouse, Finished Creatures, Tentacular and Molly Bloom. His educational work is extensive, tutoring for Poetry Society, Poetry School, Cheltenham Festivals and First Story. He holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. His debut pamphlet Wasted Rainbow was published by Tall-Lighthouse in early 2021 and his debut collection, This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches Press), was published in autumn 2021.
Jack Young is a writer and participatory artist living in Bristol. He writes hybrid works concerned with queer ecologies and has published with Somesuch Stories, HOAX, Entropy, 3:AM, Burning House Press and Caught by the River, among others. His hybrid chapbook of interspecies intimacies URTH, in collaboration with the artist Nadia Scola, was published by Big White Shed in 2022. He also co-hosts the literary podcast Tender Buttons, in partnership with Storysmith Books. He is currently curating a series of texts and a participatory programme titled “The Body Forest”, through his role as Engagement Fellow 2022 at Spike Island Gallery in Bristol, which considers our connection to the more-than-human and ways we might de-centre the human while thinking about community, time, desire, and language.
