Issue Thirty-Four: Contributors

Amy Bacon enjoys taking long walks in Bristol where she has lived and worked as a teacher since 2017. Amy discovered her love of writing during her literature studies with the OU; in 2011, she was awarded a first-class degree and went on to complete an MA in Creative Writing in 2019, gaining a distinction. Amy enjoys exploring the crossovers between poetry, art and music – and the meeting between humans and the natural world in city environments.

Martin Christmas is a South Australian poet and photographer. He has been published in Australian anthologies, and overseas on-line literary magazines including Red River Review (the USA), StepAway Magazine (the UK); and Bindweed (Ireland). He mentors young poets and edits their work. His poetry books are Immediate Reflections, The Deeper Inner, D&M Between 2 Men and Random Adventures. He has an M.A. in Cultural Studies. His photographs reflect his interest in urban street and coastal scenes.

Mary Melvin Geoghegan has five collections of poetry published. Her most recent is As Moon and Mother Collide with Salmon Poetry(2018). Her next collection There Are Only a Few Things will be published with Salmon in 2023.  Her work has been published widely including Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Crannóg, Skylight47, Orbis184 Cyphers, The Stony Thursday Book, and Hodges Figgis 250th Anthology amongst others.

Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon lives near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and writes short stories and poetry. She is widely published in online magazines and in print anthologies and received her MA in Creative Writing from Newcastle University in 2017. Her first chapbook was published in July 2019: Cerddi Bach [Little Poems], by Hedgehog Press. She is a Pushcart Prize (2019 & 2020) and Forward Prize (2019) nominee. She is developing practice as a participatory arts facilitator and believes everyone’s voice counts, even when the stories are hard to hear.

Julie Hogg is a poet from the North Yorkshire Coast. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including Butcher’s Dog, Honest Ulsterman, Magma, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Poetry Birmingham, Popshot and StepAway Magazine. Featured in anthologies by Dunlin, Listen Softly, Litmus, Zoomorphic and Seren, her debut pamphlet is Majuba Road (Vane Women Press). She publishes at Blueprint Poetry Press and reviews for London Grip.

Daniel Hinds lives in Newcastle, UK. He won the Poetry Society’s Timothy Corsellis Young Critics Prize 2018 and his prose poem review of Jay Bernard’s Surge was one of the winners of the Shortlist Book Review Competition 2020, held in celebration of the Dylan Thomas Prize by Swansea University. His poetry was commended in the National Centre for Writing’s UEA New Forms Award 2021. He was also one of the winners of The Broken Spine’s Flash Fiction Competition. He was also shortlisted for the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize 2019 and the Terry Kelly Poetry Prize 2018, and longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021. Two of his poems were highly commended in the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts Water Poetry Competition. His poetry has been published in over forty literary journals. He was commissioned by New Creatives, a talent development scheme supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts and delivered by Tyneside Cinema, to produce an audio piece based on his poetic sequence The Stone Men of Newcastle. He can be found here on Twitter.

Tom Kelly is Jarrow-born and is now living happily further up the Tyne at Blaydon. He has had thirteen books of poetry, short stories and a play published in as many years. His second short story collection NO LOVE RATIONS was published in April 2022 by Red Squirrel Press. A number of his plays and musicals (written with John Miles) have been produced by the Customs House, South Shields.

Noah Kucij‘s work has appeared in StepAway, Slipstream, Storm Cellar, 32 Poems, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and many other places.  He lives in upstate New York.

Paul Marshall has co-written two radio plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and been shortlisted for BBC Opening Lines.  Over twenty of his stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies and he has had an article published in Mojo music magazine recalling his conversations with Leonard Cohen.

Jennie E. Owen’s writing has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies.  She teaches Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children.

Martin Potter is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Manchester, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published by Eyewear in December, 2017. His website can be found here.

Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois.  She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway.  Her poems and prose appear in sixty plus journals and ten anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China.  Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. In 2021, she received an Editor’s Prize in Flash Discourse from Open: Journal of Arts & Letters; Poetry Society of Michigan’s Barbara Sykes Memorial Humor Award; and two of her poems appear in the anthology Impact: Personal Portraits of Activism, an Indie Book Awards finalist.  She is a PhD candidate, English/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University.