OUR AUTHORS
JOHN KEFALA KERR
John is a British-Greek composer, sound artist and writer. His poetry has been published by Live Canon, Arachne Press, Porridge Magazine, Crowstep Journal and Magma Poetry. John has held residencies at Durham Cathedral, National Centre for the Written Word, Dove Marine Laboratory and the Science Museum. His debut novel Thimio’s House is published by Roundfire Books. In his role as Associate Artist at An Tobar and Mull Theatre on the Isle of Mull, John wrote music and poetry inspired by the island’s textile and weaving heritage.
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Fray is a collection of poems written during John's tenure as 2022/23 Associate Artist at An Tobar and Mull Theatre on the Isle of Mull, taking inspiration from the traditions of woven textiles production on the island and drawing connections between cloth, ecology, landscape, autobiography and sensual experience. Publishing with Black Cat Press in 2026.
CLAIRE WALKER
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How To Shape Our Mouths explores womanhood, particularly through the subjects of motherhood and daughterhood including a sequence inspired by the Leonora Carrington painting The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) which centres around the character 'mother', and how the narrator has experienced mother/being mothered at various stages of life. Themes of earth and nature are a major focus, utilising different features of the painting within the poems. Publishing with Black Cat Press in 2026.
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CHERYL MOSKOWITZ
Cheryl’s poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Manhattan Review, Finished Creatures, The Rialto, Bad Lilies, Under the Radar amongst others and have won prizes in The National Poetry Competition, The Moth Poetry Prize, Bridport and the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry & Medicine. Poems published in The Manhattan Review have twice been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.
She is an Editor at Magma Poetry and also writes fiction. Publications include novel, Wyoming Trail (Granta) and the forthcoming Greeting Card Lou, a middle-grade novel for children coming out with Troika Books in 2026. A self-published collection of poetry The Girl is Smiling in 2012, and pamphlet Maternal Impression published by Against the Grain Press in 2021. Most recently Wayward Thoughts, an audio CD of her poetry duetted with lutenist Sam Brown, and was released earlier this month.
The presence of the perfectly preserved remains of a vixen discovered under her writing shed provides the axis around which many of these poems revolve on the nature of the human and more-than-human condition through a psychological lens. The poems in The Fossil Issue examine personal grief, love and relationships framed by wider considerations of life’s beginnings and endings – these poems, like fossils, serve as remnants and celebrations of human connection that persist long into the future. Forthcoming in 2027.
Photo courtesy of Hayley Madden https://www.maddmannphotography.com/about
LISA O'HARE
Lisa O’Hare is a BBC Words First finalist who has had work featured on BBC Radio 3. She has worked with the National Literacy Trust and National Poetry Centre. Lisa has also performed her own one-woman poetry show at many fringe festivals, including Edinburgh.
We’re excited to showcase a sampler of poems forthcoming in 2027 that explore how nature forces itself into unexpected places in urban settings and Lisa’s own sense of displacement living in places she never fully belongs in.
PAUL atten ASH
​Paul atten Ash is the pseudonym of Bristol UK-based author and art-photographer Paul Nash. His work is fuelled by his response to navigating the climate tragedy and attendant grief/moral injury as a father to two children, giving voice to the other-than-human in an age of exhaustion – ecopoetics as a creative act of resistance.
Paul’s work has been published by Acid Bath Publishing, BBC Radio 6 Music, Broken Sleep Books, Butcher’s Dog, Dark Mountain, Free Verse Revolution (Pushcart Prize nominated), Gothic Keats Press (BOTN nominated), Magma, PBLJ, Poetry Scotland, Salò Press, Scarlet Tiger Press, Shooter, Sídhe Press, Under The Radar, among others. Searchlight Seasons, his debut pamphlet, was published by Atomic Bohemian (2024). Paul is currently curating a multi-contributor contrapuntal ecopoetry project, We Dream in Green.
Recent awards include: Oppenheim–John Downes Memorial Trust (2024). Recent competition placings include: Classical Association (HC, 2024); The Winged Muse (Winner, 2025). Recent prize shortlistings include: Alpine Fellowship (2023); Ginkgo (2022, 2021); Hexham (2023).
For links to Paul’s published work, visit campsite.bio/northseanavigator and follow him online at: IG/Threads @north_sea_navigator and Bsky @northseanavigator.bsky.social
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PRATIBHA CASTLE
Pratibha’s work is published widely in journals such as Under the Radar, Southword, Tears in the Fence, London Grip, Ink Sweat and Tears, Stand and The Storms. She was a finalist in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Award 2024, and commended in the McLellan Poetry Prize 2025, shortlisted in the Fish, Live Canon and Bridport Competitions (twice), awarded third prize in Sonnet or Not and Plaza Competitions amongst others.
She has two pamphlets with Hedgehog Poetry Press.
Her upcoming pamphlet with Black Cat in 2027 is inspired by life as an Irish child growing up in 1950s/1960s London, with particular emphasis on the maternal relationship. Her love and connection with nature is a common theme within the poems as well as a sense of longing for the land of her birth.
ROCHELLE HANSLOW
Rochelle is a Scottish, neurodivergent, chronically ill writer, poet, and Substack essayist whose work inhabits the space between the magical, the human, and the more-than-human world. She talks to trees and dogs more than people, exploring kinship across species while balancing the domestic in life. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Dreich Mag, Propel Magazine, Eche Poetry, The Anti-Misogyny Club, Happiful, Conscious Being and Black Cat Press.
Wolf in the Nursery is a menagerie of maternal moments—a lyrical journey through pregnancy, birth, childhood, and the wild terrain of raising neurodivergent children as a neurodivergent and chronically ill mother. The collection invites readers to navigate the nursery as both refuge and wilderness, where the maternal body is home, map, and creature alike. From the intimate interiors of night feeds and whispered fears to expansive meditations on animal kinship, plant consciousness, and environmental intimacy, this sequence frames motherhood as an act of survival, transformation, and radical interconnection with the world around us. Tender, fierce, and unapologetic, Wolf in the Nursery illuminates a domestic world that is at once familiar and untamed, revealing the profound transformations, joys, and urgencies of maternal life.
BRONWEN R. EVANS
Bronwen is a poet and creative naturalist living in Somerset, UK. Nominated for a Pushcart prize, her poetry explores memory, the supernatural, and experiences embedded in natural landscapes. Her poems have been featured in numerous publications and anthologies, and she was a winner within the Guernsey International Poetry Competition, reading at Guernsey Lit fest 2025. She recently co-edited a nature anthology with The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.
We look forward to sampling Bronwen's work in 2027. The poems explore our connection to environment and place approached through multiple related lenses - nature loss, the position we find ourselves in as both part of the cycles of nature and separate to them, the ideas of the supernatural and folkloric in our depictions and experiences of natural landscapes, and the concept of finding a sense of belonging and connectivity in nature/shedding the notion of ownership.
FIJA CALLAGHAN
Fija’s work has appeared in Seaside Gothic, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Corvid Queen, Luna Station Quarterly, Howl: New Irish Writing, and more. She’s also the author of a short story collection, Frail Little Embers. She was first place in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association’s Speculative Poetry Prize in 2024.
A Subversive Hunger draws from folklore, fairytales, and the natural world. The title was inspired by Katherine Rundell’s book Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, in which she says “Real fairytales are about hunger: hunger for power, above all; but also hunger for justice, for love, for change and transformation, for other humans.”
ALICE O'MALLEY WOODS
Alice O'Malley-Woods is a poet, artist and researcher based in Lewes, East Sussex. Her work explores themes of loss, ecogrief, and disability. She is currently completing a PhD in neuroqueer ecopoetics at Brighton University. ​​
Ecotone is a poetic exploration of what it means to exist between two worlds, thematically framed between two difference geographic regions, the chalky South Downs, and the salty coast of South West Devon. The collection finds expression for the way in which the body stores both trauma and hope, acting as a liminal space between personal timelines, giving voice to the way in which, just like soils beneath our feat, bodies hold both painful histories and fertile futures. Publishing with Black Cat Press in 2026.
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EMMA CONALLY-BARKLEM
Emma Conally-Barklem is an author, poet and yoga teacher based in Yorkshire. In 2023, she was New Northern Poet for Ilkley Literature Festival. Her collection The Ridings was curated into an exhibition in her hometown, Bradford. Hymns from the Sisters was written after a residency at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Emma won the Black in White Poetry Prize 2024. Her first novel, Yoga Homicide was shortlisted for the 2024 Book Edit Writers’ Prize. She is as a core poet for the BBC’s Contains Strong Language Poetry Festival 2025.
Emily Brontë's Hawk is a collection that takes its creative inspiration from one of the few details known about Emily Brontë. It is believed she rescued then kept a Merlin Hawk who she called Nero. Her bird of prey soars through history and the West Yorkshire landscape both quarry and predator. Conally-Barklem explores what it means to be captive and to be wild, the condition of the falconer, its lore and mystery through the enigmatic Brontë sister who stands both inside and outside of time. Publishing with Black Cat Press in 2026.
RICHARD SKINNER
Richard Skinner has published seven books of poems, the most recent of which is White Noise Machine (Salt, 2023). Richard is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy. He also runs a small press, VanguardEditions, and is the current editor of 14 magazine.
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Crossing Paths is a collaboration between Richard Skinner and Jean Atkin, both keen walkers, both of whose work is informed by the natural world and the human experience of exploring it. Crossing Paths is a book of poems about walking, place, nomenclature and nature publishing in 2026 with Black Cat Press.
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JEAN ATKIN
Jean Atkin walks with a notebook in her pocket, and is easily tempted away from the signposted path. Her third full poetry collection ‘High Nowhere’ (IDP, 2023) was nominated for the 2024 Laurel Prize and Coast to Coast to Coast published her winning Individual Poet Journal in 2025. She has previously published another eight poetry books, often dealing with place, nature and story. Her poetry has won competitions, been commissioned, anthologised, and featured on BBC Radio 4. Since 2010 Jean has worked as a poet in education and community, often in collaboration with other artists.
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​Crossing Paths is a collaboration between Richard Skinner and Jean Atkin, both keen walkers, both of whose work is informed by the natural world and the human experience of exploring it. Crossing Paths is a book of poems about walking, place, nomenclature and nature publishing in 2026 with Black Cat Press.
BARRY HOLLOW
Barry Hollow lives in Bristol but was born and raised in Ayrshire, Scotland. He’s been published in various publications and journals and has been featured regularly on BBC Radio and is emerging on the spoken word scene in Bristol.
Barry's debut collection Viaducts and Riverviews explores the relationship with home and belonging, the nostalgia that comes from leaving home and the feeling of discovering a new one. Viaducts and River Views builds between its pages a sense of journey through an exploration of place, nature, self and the lyrical nature of language. Purchase a copy here.
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His second collection Fankle is due with Black Cat Press in 2026. Fankle is what you get when life's mixed up. Threads crossing, stories knotting, and meaning slips through your fingers, just when you think you've got a hold of it. This collection of poems doesn't offer neat answers, it wades into the dirty muddle, the glorious fankled mess of it.
LISA SIMPSON
Lisa Simpson is poet from Manchester, UK. She has performed at the Altrincham Arts Festival and Poetry Reverb and has had her work published by Train River Publishing and the Black Cat Poetry Press.
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Lisa's poem 'In which she asks what are you scared of?' was commended in the Magma Poetry Competition in 2023, judged by Victoria Kennefick.
Lisa’s debut pamphlet ‘birdsong’ captures different aspects of life during the Covid pandemic through the lens of parenting, politics, mental health and nature.
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Instagram: @lisa.simpson.poet
CATHERINE BALAQ
Catherine Balaq is a writer and body psychotherapist. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prize. She is Co-Editor of Black Cat Press. She has two collections of poems, 'animaginary' with Black Cat and 'Deathless' with Verve. Catherine also writes novels and is represented by Donald Winchester at Watson Little. https://www.watsonlittle.com/client/catherine-balaq/
Catherine Balaq channels the daemon onto the page, summoning colour from darkness.
-Paul Lynch, Booker Prize winner, 2023.
'animaginary' is a journey through the archetypes of the subconscious. The beasts of the underworld hold our hopes and fears, life in one hand and death in the other. The collection entwines animism and psychology with the intention of personal alchemy. A mythic landscape opens to explore the darker side of the self in a Hecartic tradition. Animal spirits haunt the collection as shapeshifters, bringing self-actualisation in degrees both terrifying and rewarding. It ends with 'The World', eating its own tail in a metaphorical transformation. The poems speak of family, grief, gender roles, class and body politics.
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X: @catbalaq
Instagram: @catbalaq
JENNY MUNRO-HUNT
Jenny Munro-Hunt is a poet from Glasgow, Scotland. Her work has appeared in The6ress, Soor Plooms, Poetry Scotland and Heather: An Anthology of Scottish Writing and Art. She was longlisted for the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2022.
Her collection Towards A Radical Tenderness explores motherhood, food and the uncanny.
She can be found on Instagram: @jennymunrohunt
LAURA LEWIS-WATERS
Laura Lewis-Waters is a mum, poet, teacher and PhD candidate from the Midlands. Her debut collection Bathroom Prisoners was published in May 2022 by Bent Key Publishing and is a vulnerable account of her experience with OCD while pregnant. Her second collection Beneath the Light will be published by Querencia Press and continues her mental health journey with a new baby after birth trauma. She also writes about climate change, particularly sea level rise, and her poems have recently been featured on the BBC Upload Festival as well as in Public Sector Poetry Journal, Free Verse Revolution Lit Magazine and Streetcake Magazine.
Her upcoming pamphlet Where Sea Meets Sea explores the changing East Anglia coast through confessional and imagined writing. Some of the poems include verbatim to raise awareness of peoples' experience of sea level rise.
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Instagram: @lauralewis_waters
KAREN PIERCE GONZALEZ
Down River with Li Po is Karen Pierce Gonzalez’s third chapbook. Prior chapbooks include True North (Origami Poems Project), and Coyote in the basket of my ribs (Alabaster Leaves). Her fiction, non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications (Honeyguide Literary Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Time Worn Journal, etc.) and when not writing or facilitating writing workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area, she creates 3D assemblage art from natural and found materials.
Down River with Li Po is a collection of 27 eco-poems inspired by the river travels of classic Tang Dynasty poet Li Po. Follow her on X, Facebook, and Instagram.
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VANESSA NAPOLITANO
Vanessa is Yorkshire-based writer with a MA in Poetry from MMU. She was Word Up North New Northern Writer 2025. Her work has been published in journals including Interpreter’s House, And Other Poems, Alchemy Spoon and Clarion, in several anthologies, and has been featured by Black Bough Poetry as part of their Silver Branch project. She has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Her pamphlet ‘Various Magics’ was published by Black Cat Press in 2024, and she has a pamphlet forthcoming with Stanchion Press in May of this year. She writes on themes of place, grief, nature and identity.
Her collection Various Magics is informed by the natural and domestic world, the poems explore connection, emotion, and moments of meaning - small details, and big feelings.
I’ll know I’m home is Vanessa's first collection forthcoming in 2027 and explores identity in the context of natural and suburban environments through themes of place, home, grief and memory.
The speaker of one poem grows a second skin at summer solstice; in another, a woman becomes chimney swallows; a woman is standing outside a bar in Los Angeles; is blackberry-picking in a quarry. Drawing on different seasons, phases of life, cities, and transitions, the poems question what it means to know yourself, and the complex intersection of internal and external worlds.
Photo credit: Rich Bunce​
Vanessa can be found at @nessanapswrites on Instagram.
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN
Christopher is a poet and Buddhist living by the River Tyne on the North East coast of England. Widely published his work has featured with the likes of Amethyst Review / 14 Magazine / Fevers of the Mind / Sam Lee and the Nest Collectives Singing with Nightingales. He was runner up in The Black Cat Press Sea competition, 3rd place in East Ridge Reviews Winter Green comp as well as several shortlisted and highly commended places.
He is currently collaborating with Gazan artist Bejal Khalil on a series of poems and paintings.
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His upcoming debut pamphlet is a meditation on grief, colour and light. A collection of elegies centred around the healing presence and metaphor of the sacred world.
Instagram: @martintimations
BEX HAINSWORTH
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and has been shortlisted in the Welsh Poetry Competition, Waltham Forest Poetry Competition, and the AUB International Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Coachella Review, Atrium, Okay Donkey, bath magg, and trampset.
Her collection Walrussey is a collection of poetry which explores marine ecosystems and their inhabitants, from a Greenland shark lurking in the depths of Arctic waters to the tide pools of the Welsh coast. It is an ode to the beauty of these aquatic worlds, but also a warning about the devastating impacts of climate change.
X: @PoetBex
CORINNA BOARD
Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in Oxford. She grew up on her grandparents’ farm and is particularly inspired by nature and the rural environment. Her work is published in Green Ink, Black Cat Poetry Press, Anthropocene, Spelt and elsewhere.
Her collection Arboreal (of or living in trees) explores the relationships between human and nature, real and imaginary, how a walk in the woods can become a journey of self-discovery.
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Arboreal was a Poetry Book Society summer pamphlet choice and is also available via their website.
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Instagram: @parole_de_reveuse
REBECCA RAE
Rebecca Rae is a poetess living in Devon, where the natural landscape she loves to explore informs and inspires her work, weaving together dreams, healing and the Female Gothic. Published by Hecate Magazine and the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, she has also been twice shortlisted for the Royal Court Writers Group and features in both anthologies of Quay Voices published by Literature Works.
Her upcoming debut poetry collection, A Book Is A Bird That Sings In The Evening combines themes of nature, shadow work, self-reflection and myth to invite readers on a journey through dark dreams and labyrinths, seeking redemption, healing and hope.
Instagram: @rhraewrites
X: @rhrae
GALIA ADMONI
Galia Admoni is a writer, musician and Head of English at a school in London. She has poems in Bad Lilies, The North, The Rialto and others. She is the author of 'i get lost everywhere, you know this now' (Salo Press, 2024). Follow her on X @galiamelon
The often world-weary speaker in the central cycle of her upcoming collection Immediately after and then later, confronts the experiences, breakdowns and aftermaths of their relationships. They speak of surviving and of not surviving. This pamphlet is a collection of small windows into a life of someone who can’t help but fall in love, no matter how many times they get hurt.
BENEDICTA NORELL
Benedicta lives in Oxford. After her MA in Creative Writing at Brookes University, she worked as an editorial assistant before becoming a freelance editor of fiction and memoir. Her poetry explores themes relating to identity, self-worth, family and body politics. Journals in which her poems appear, or are upcoming, include Atrium Poetry, Dust Poetry Magazine, Worktown Words, The Nuthatch, Blue Press and Ink Sweat and Tears.
Terrible Mother, her debut pamphlet with Black Cat Poetry Press, arose out of a year bookended by coronavirus and memories of her mother’s stroke. The collection moves from childhood through new motherhood to midlife and charts a journey from self-loathing to something like its opposite.
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Benedicta writes with truth and beauty, her words are soft to the touch but burn bright, shining a light on the pain and complexities of love and family.
-Kit de Waal, bestselling author of My Name is Leon
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Instagram: @benedictanorell
X: @benedicta_be
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KRISTINA DIPROSE
Kristina Diprose co-runs the Rhubarb at the Triangle open mic in Shipley, and co-edited its anthologies Un/Forced and Seconds. She has been shortlisted in the Ginkgo Prize and Leeds Poetry Festival competitions and was an Ilkley Literature Festival 2023 New Northern Poet. Recent poems appear in publications from Strix, Open Shutter Press and The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.
Diamond dust falls hundreds of miles from the Arctic and a woman overwinters as a wood frog. Starlings learn the language of a two-stroke engine and a battery hen holds court in a friend’s living room. These are poems about human entanglement in nature, everyday wonders and where we seek solace. Thins Spells is Kristina's debut pamphlet of eco poetry.
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Instagram: @kristinadiprose