Our Writers/Illustrators

Photo by Leah Adkins

MARGARET ADKINS is a postgraduate research student at Worcester University. She is interested in the concept of home and the stories of others. Her poetry features online and in the following anthologies: This Is Not Your Final Form (Emma Press 2017) The Physic Garden (Palewell Press 2017) and two Beautiful Dragons collections (2016/17). Previously she was a nurse and midwife; she was placed second in Our NHS70 Poetry Competition (2018). She won the inaugural V Press Prize for Poetry , with her debut poetry pamphlet Mingled Space published by V. Press in 2019.

ROMALYN ANTE grew up in Batangas, Philippines. At 16, she migrated to the UK, where she now works as a nurse and a psychotherapist. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and e-journals in the UK, USA, and South East Asia, including Under the Radar, Cannon’s Mouth, Ink, Sweat, & Tears, Eastlit Literary Magazine and Anak Sastra. She has prize-winning poems in The Yellow Book (Rethink your Mind, 2015) and was commended in the ‘Poetry’ category of Creative Future Literary Awards in 2016. A Jerwood/Arvon mentee 2017-2018, she is currently working towards a full collection. Rice & Rain is her debut poetry pamphlet. 

ELAINE BAKER is a freelance poetry teacher and mentor with a passion for inspiring the next generation, including young writers in secondary schools. She has been Poet-in-Residence at Nomura, London, the National Poetry Library and Vale & Downland Museum, Wantage. Her poetry is widely published, including poems in The Emma Press Anthology of Contemporary Gothic Verse, Brittle Star; The North, Envoi, The Interpreter’s House, Proletarian Poetry and Snakeskin. She was a 2017 Mslexia poetry competition finalist and has an MA in Writing Poetry. Winter with Eva (V. Press, 2020) is her debut poetry pamphlet. Website here. 

KEREN BANNING grew up singing in bands on the coast at North Tyneside. This led to a BA in Performing Arts, and teaching voice production in both formal and informal settings. She now lives in the Tynedale Valley, working across artistic disciplines as singer, composer, musician, actor, facilitator, wood turner and photographer. Her images appear in a V. Press pamphlet produced in collaboration with poet Alex Reed, entitled These nights at home.

CHARLEY BARNES has poetry published in journals including Picaroon Poetry, Riggwelter  Press and Fresh Air Poetry. She has two poetry pamphlets, A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache  (V. Press, 2018) and Body Talk (Picaroon Poetry, 2019), one chapbook of prose, Death Is A Terrible House Guest (The Black Light Engine Room Press, 2019) and crime novels including Intention and Copycat (Bloodhound Books, 2019). She is editor of the Dear Reader poetry website, Personal Essays and Creative Non-fiction Editor at Mookychick, and current Director of Sabotage Reviews. Hierarchy of Needs is her poetry pamphlet written collaboratively with Claire Walker.

MIRANDA LYNN BARNES is a poet, writer, and educator from the US, now resident in the UK. Her poems have appeared in New Welsh Reader, Shearsman, Poetry Birmingham, Tears in the Fence, Under the Radar, The Compass, The Interpreter’s House, and Lighthouse Journal, among other journals and anthologies. Miranda taught Creative Writing for five years at Bath Spa University, where she earned her Doctorate. She now serves as Research Publications Librarian at Bath Spa University, and lives in Bristol. Her V. Press pamphlet is Blue Dot Aubade.

NATALIE LINH BOLDERSTON studied English at the University of Liverpool, where she won the 2016 Felicia Hemans Prize for Lyrical Poetry and the 2017 Miriam Allott Poetry Prize. She now works as an Editorial Assistant. Her work has been featured in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, L'Éphémère Review, Oxford Poetry, Smoke, and The Tangerine. She is a 2018 Creative Future Literary Award recipient. Her pamphlet The Protection of Ghosts was selected by  V. Press Guest Editor Carrie Etter.

Photo by Tina Barnes

HELEN CALCUTT is a globally published poet and critic. Her work features in over 40 journals, and she performs her work internationally. She has taken on writing residences with The National Trust and Loughborough University, where she's also a visiting lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing.  Helen’s pamphlet Sudden rainfall was published by experimental publishing house Perdika Press when she was 23. It was shortlisted for the PBS Pamphlet Choice award, and in 2016 became a Waterstones’ best-selling collection. Unable Mother (V. Press, 2018) is her first full-length book of poems. 

DAVID CALCUTT is a widely published playwright, poet and novelist. He has written over forty plays and adaptations for touring and community theatre, and BBC radio. Several plays and three novels for young people are published by Oxford University Press. His pamphlets include Outlaws (Iron Press), Road Kill, a collaboration with Nadia Kingsley, and Through the Woods, with Nadia Kingsley and Peter Tinkler (both Fairacre Press). He has worked as a storyteller, director of community plays and projects, and writer in residence. David's V. Press poetry pamphlet The Old Man in the House of Bone is illustrated by Peter Tinkler.

Photo by Joanna Charter

PHILIP CHARTER is an English writing coach who works with non-native speakers. He is the author of two short fiction collections, Foreign Voices, and The Fisherwoman and other stories.  Philip's stories have won or placed in competitions such as the Loft Books Short Story Competition, The Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and the Janus Lit Anthology competition. His V. Press longer flash fiction chapbook Fifteen Brief Moments in Time is his debut novella-in-flash.

DAVID CLARKE is Lincolnshire-born but now lives in Gloucestershire. He works as a teacher and researcher. His pamphlet, Gaud (Flarestack), won the Michael Marks Award in 2013. His first full collection of poetry, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2016 and was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. He has taught online for The Poetry School and has published poems in magazines such as Magma, Tears in the Fence and Long Poem Magazine. He reviews poetry, and blogs at http://athingforpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/. His V. Press 2017 poetry pamphlet is Scare Stories.

Photo by Richard Austen

CATHERINE CROSSWELL is a performance poet, frustrated slammer, untidy wife, mother, bidet doubter, list lover, singer and guitarist. She studied Contemporary Arts at Nottingham Trent where she formed half of the award-winning comedy singing act 'Lindsey & Catherine.' As a poet, Catherine has performed at various poetry/literary festivals including Ledbury, Cheltenham and Stratford. In 2013, Catherine created a new word ‘Fusterbrothy’ with accompanying poem, published in the English PEN ebook ‘Made-up words’. Her website is at www.catherinecrosswell.co.uk and her poems feature in the V. Press publication The Vaginellas.

STEPHEN DANIELS' poetry has been widely published, including in The Interpreter’s House, Obsessed With Pipework, Ink Sweat & Tears, And Other Poems, The Lake, Clear Poetry, Picaroon Poetry, The Fat Damsel, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Eunoia Review, Algebra of Owls, The Open Mouse, I am not a silent poet, Nutshells and Nuggets, Richard Jefferies Writers – ’78 Anthology, Domestic Cherry and Ink Sweat & Tears’ 12 Days of Christmas 2016. He was runner-up in Candlestick Press micropoem competition 2015. His V. Press poetry pamphlet is Tell Mistakes I Love Them. Website: www.stephenkirkdaniels.com. Twitter: @stephendaniels.

JAMES DAVEY grew up in Bristol and currently lectures in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Before returning to the U.K. in 2014, he spent three years working in Catania, Sicily, as an English-language teacher. His poetry has previously appeared in journals including Poetry Wales, New Welsh Reader, Stand, The Warwick Review, Ambit, New Walk, Agenda, and The Interpreter’s House. How to Parallel Park is his debut poetry pamphlet.

Photo by Robbie Elford

GRAM JOEL DAVIES grew up in Somerset in the ’80s. His writing has appeared in Magma, The Moth, Envoi and Lighthouse, and received listings/commendations from Penelope Shuttle, Peter Oswald, Liz Berry and Carol Ann Duffy. He and Hannah Linden won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Compound collaboration competition 2014. Working with Juncture 25 poets, he attends readings and festivals across the Southwest. He takes particular interest in editing poetry and likes to explore moors, ruins, galleries and power stations with his girlfriend. Bolt Down This Earth (V. Press, 2017) is his first collection.

NICHOLA DEANE was born in Bolton in 1973. She was educated at the Universities of St Andrews and Manchester. In 2012, her first pamphlet, My Moriarty, won the Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Prize, and was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her second pamphlet, Trieste (Smith Doorstop, 2015), was a Laureate’s Choice. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Poetry London, Magma, Archipelago, and The Rialto. ‘Yesterday’s Child’ was Highly Commended in the 2014 Forward Prize. Cuckoo is her first collection (V. Press, Oct 2019). 

SARAH DOYLE is the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Poet-in-Residence, and co-author of Dreaming Spheres: Poems of the Solar System (PS Publishing, 2014). Runner-up in the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize 2020 and Poetry Prize 2019, she won Wolverhampton Literature Festival poetry competition and Holland Park Press’s Brexit in Poetry in 2019, and was highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2018. She is researching a PhD in the poetics of meteorology at Birmingham City University. Her first V. Press poetry pamphlet is Something so wild and new in this feeling. A second, (m)othersongs, is forthcoming in 2023. Website: sarahdoyle.co.uk.

JOHN DUFFIN is a painter and printmaker based in London. Over a 35-year career he has held over 60 one-man shows of his work and won many awards including ‘Best Printmaker’ award from Sir Peter Blake. His work is in many public and private collections including Museum of London, V&A, Ashmolean Oxford, Fitzwilliam Cambridge and his work was recently added to the Royal Collection of the Queen. He's illustrator for John Dust, a poetry pamphlet with poems by Louise Warren (V. Press, 2019). 

Photo by Dot & Lucy Photography

CARRIE ETTER grew up in Normal, Illinois, spent thirteen years in southern California, and moved to England in 2001. Her fourth collection of poetry, The Weather in Normal (US: Station Hill; UK: Seren), will be published in autumn 2018; her individual poems have appeared in Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The New Republic, and many other journals in the US and UK. Her V. Press pamphlet, Hometown, is her first collection of fiction. She is Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and also teaches for The Poetry School and Poetry Swindon. 

JINNY FISHER was a classical violinist, then a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, now a poet full-time. A member of Wells Fountain Poets, her work's appeared in print and online magazines including The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Domestic Cherry, Tears in the Fence, Prole, The Poetry Shed, Strange Poetry, Amaryllis and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Commended in national competitions, she was runner-up in The Interpreter’s House Competition 2016. She's committed to bringing poetry to a wider audience and takes her Poetry Pram to music festivals for one-to-one readings. Her V. Press poetry pamphlet is The Escapologist . Twitter: @MsJinnifer.

Photo by Lee Allen

KATHY GEE grew up in York in a family of historians and archaeologists but she decided working in museums was warmer than holes in the ground. She now lives in Worcestershire, U.K. Widely published, Kathy has been highly commended in three poetry prizes and two pamphlet competitions, and was a finalist for the Worcestershire Laureate. She organised a poetry trail and anthology of poems inspired by Avoncroft Museum of Buildings, is a regular performer at spoken word events and spends most of her spare cash on theatre and travel. Book of Bones (V. Press, 2016) is her first collection. Checkout is her 2019 V. Press pamphlet.

GEORGIA GILDEA is a writer from Oxford. She is a graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme (2016) and holds an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published poems in Marble, Lunate and The Cardiff Review. Georgia is interested in writing that emerges from a place of voicelessness, and in the complex process of claiming a voice. Her forthcoming V. Press poetry title, bed, is her debut pamphlet.

IAN GLASS grew up in Northumberland and lives in Worcestershire where he has read, written and occasionally performed poetry since the departure of his wife and her death five years later. He trained as an engineer and works as a computer programmer, but prefers writing. His poems use everyday objects and events to explore feelings of loss, despair, recovery and hope. About Leaving is his first pamphlet.

Photo by Bettina Adela

SK GROUT (she/they) is a writer, editor and poet. She grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, lived in Germany and now splits her time between London and Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds a post-graduate degree in creative writing from City, University of London, and is a Feedback Editor for Tinderbox Poetry. Her poetry and reviews are widely published in the US, UK, Europe and the Pacific, including Cordite Poetry Review, dialogist, Glass and Finished Creatures. She was 2nd in the Ambit Poetry Competition 2020. Her poetry annals micro chapbook is to be female is to be interrogated (2018). A debut pamphlet, What love would smell like, is forthcoming with V. Press. Website

CHLOE HANKS is an experimental and ambitious writer originally from the Cotswolds, currently based in Worcester. Having dabbled in songwriting and live performance, she found an innovative place to write within the poetry genre. Inspired by themes such as witchcraft, spirituality and identity, her poetry explores the latter by removing its contextual constraints and dissecting the elements which settle us into stereotypes. In 2020 she graduated with a first class degree in English Literature and Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Worcester and was named the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2020 winner. Her debut pamphlet May We All Be Artefacts is forthcoming with V. Press in 2021.

JUDE HIGGINS has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her short fictions have been published in the Fish Prize Anthology, Great Jones Street, Halo and Severine magazines, Flash Frontier, The Nottingham Review, The New Flash Fiction Review, The Blue Fifth Review and National Flash Fiction Day Anthologies among other places. She has won or been placed in several flash fiction competitions. Jude runs Bath Flash Fiction Award, and loves everything to do with flash fiction. Her website is at http://judehiggins.com and her twitter tag is @judehwriter. The Chemist's House is her 2017 V. Press pamphlet of flash fiction.

Photo by Kevin Thomas

CHARLIE HILL has been described by Jim Crace as 'a real writer'. He is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, a novella and a handful of poems. His short stories have appeared in a variety of magazines and journals in print and online, and he has been widely anthologised. In 2015, a story was republished by Birmingham's Ikon Gallery to complement their summer exhibition. His 2017 V. Press short fiction pamphlet is Walking Backwards.

Photo by NB-Design

MARY-JANE HOLMES' work features in Magma, Mslexia, The Lonely Crowd, Prole, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Barren, Spelk, Cabinet of Heed, Firewords, Flashback Fiction, Fictive Dream, Best Small Fictions 2014/16/18/20 and Best Microfictions 2020. She won Bath Novella-in-Flash Prize 2020, Reflex Fiction and Mslexia Flash prizes. Her novella is Don’t Tell the Bees (Ad Hoc Fiction). She has a Creative Writing MA (Distinction) from Kellogg College, Oxford, and is studying for a PhD in poetry and translation at Newcastle University. Her V. Press flash fiction chapbook is Set a Crow to Catch a Crow.

JENNY HOPE is a writer, poet and workshop facilitator. She leads the Worcester City Write-On Writing Squad for Writing West Midlands. She also works for the In the Pink Dementia Poetry Project with the Courtyard Theatre, Hereford. Her poetry collection Petrolhead was published in January 2010 by Oversteps Books. She is currently working on her second collection as well as a whole load other things, which keeps life interesting. She is also a woman with a tree-thing and lives in Wildish-Worcestershire. Her website is at www.poetrymaker.co.uk and her poems feature in the V. Press publication The Vaginellas.

SARAH JAMES is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist, and photographer, with eight poetry titles, two novellas and a poetry-play. Into the Yell (Circaidy Gregory Press) won third prize in the International Rubery Book Awards 2011. The Magnetic Diaries (Knives Forks And Spoons Press) was highly commended in the Forward Prizes and a poetry-play version toured by Reaction Theatre Makers. plenty-fish (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted in the International Rubery Book Awards 2016. Overton Poetry Prize winner 2015 and 2020, she has several poetry pamphlets. Her poems feature in V. Press's The Vaginellas. 

Website: www.sarah-james.co.uk.

HELEN KAY's poems crop up in magazines including The Morning Star, Stand, The Rialto, Strix and The Fenland Reed. She completed an MA in poetry at MMU, winning the 2018 Rosamond Prize. She was second in the Leeds Peace Prize (2018) and Welshpool Poetry Competition (2019). She curates a project called Dyslexia Poetry & Imagination which provides a platform for poets and artists with learning differences (Fb page Dyslexia and Poetry). Her pamphlet, The Poultry Lover’s Guide to Poetry (Indigo Dreams, 2016), reflects her love of hens. She is a dyslexia tutor. Her V. Press poetry pamphlet is This Lexia & Other Languages.

Photo by Camille Lauder-Mander

CHARLES G LAUDER JR was born in San Antonio, Texas, lived for a few years each on America’s East and West Coasts, and moved to south Leicestershire, UK, in 2000. His poems have been published widely in print and online, and in his two pamphlets Bleeds (Crystal Clear Creators, 2012) and Camouflaged Beasts (BLER, 2017). From 2014 to 2018, he was the Assistant Editor for The Interpreter’s House, and for over twenty years he has copy-edited academic books on literature, history, medicine, and science. His debut poetry collection is The Aesthetics of Breath (V. Press, Oct 2019). Twitter: @cglauder

JOHN LAWRENCE lives in Worcestershire, although he was born and bred in the Black Country. He gave up a career in IT Consultancy to gain a Creative Writing BA at the University of Birmingham, where he ‘found’ poetry. A popular poet and performer, he loves writing poems that are entertaining and unsettling. His work is informed by family, experience, his roots in a Salvation Army household, and ever-present doubts about why we are here. John’s parody The Secret Five and the Stunt Nun Legacy (Matador) is powered by similar imaginative wit. The boy who couldn’t say his name is his first poetry collection.

S.A. LEAVESLEY runs V. Press and is a prize-winning journalist, fiction writer, poet and photographer. Behind the camera, she is a woman of few words. Her photographic sequence, 'Fragile' was inspired by and created for Nina Lewis' V. Press pamphlet Fragile Houses. (She also works/writes under the name Sarah James.)

Photo by Reg Nichols

NINA LEWIS is a widely published poet who often performs at spoken word events/literary festivals. Worcestershire Poet Laureate 2017/18, she was commissioned to write and perform poetry at Birmingham Literature Festival 2014, and featured in the poetry trail for Wenlock Poetry Festival 2014. Her haiku have appeared in a Midlands Art Centre art installation, on the Poetry Fence at Acton Scott Historic Working Farm and in Municipal Bank Vaults for an International Dance Festival. Fragile Houses (V. Press, 2016) is her first pamphlet and her second is Patience.

Photo by Carly Etherington

HANNAH LINDEN is from a Northern working-class background but has been based in rural Devon for most of her adult life, where she lives with her two (adult and adult-cusp) children in ramshackle social housing. Navigating depression/anxiety, she has been published widely , including in Acumen, Atrium, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Stand, Tears in the Fence and Under the Radar. Her most recent awards are 1st prize in the Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2021 and Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. The Beautiful Open Sky is her debut pamphlet. Twitter: @hannahl1n

Photo by Rebecca Noakes Photography

MICHAEL LOVEDAY's debut poetry pamphlet He Said / She Said was published by HappenStance Press in 2011. Since 2013, he has been working as a tutor in Community and Higher Education, teaching fiction, poetry, life writing and general literature. He is a Director of the National Association of Writers in Education, and his blog of interviews with writers of flash fiction, poetry and prose poetry can be found at pagechatter.org. Since 2016, he has lived in Bath. His flash fiction novella drawing on the techniques of prose poetry, Three Men on the Edge (V. Press, 2018) was inspired by his experiences of an in-between place.

PAUL MCDONALD is Course Leader for Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton. His novels include Surviving Sting (2001), Kiss Me Softly Amy Turtle (2004) and Do I Love You? (2008), with poetry collected in The Right Suggestion (1999), Catch a Falling Tortoise (2007) and An Artist Goes Bananas (2012). His scholarly work includes books on American literature, narratology, and flash fiction. Paul also has research interests in humour, taking pleasure in the fact that Googling ‘the oldest joke in the world’ throws up several hundred pages with his name on. Midnight Laughter is his V. Press flash fiction pamphlet.

JACK MCGOWAN is a poet and researcher writing for both print and performance. His work has been published in anthologies including New Flights and Voices (Worple Press) and The New Victoria: Anthology of Collected Poets (New Fire Tree Press) and he has performed at festivals across the UK and on BBC radio. Jack is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Worcester. In 2021, he co-edited Spoken Word in the UK – a book of critical essays exploring contemporary UK performance poetry. His forthcoming V. Press chapbook, Powerless Rangers, is inspired by nineties nostalgia. 

DAMHNAIT MONAGHAN was born and raised in Canada but now lives in the U.K.  She has had more than thirty flash fiction (and creative non-fiction) pieces published in places like Mslexia, Jellyfish Review, Ellipsis Zine, TSS Publishing, and the 2016 and 2018 National Flash Fiction Day anthologies. She is a member of the Editorial Board for FlashBack Fiction and tweets @Downith (which is also how to pronounce her name). The Neverlands is a pamphlet of interlinked stories.

Photo by Phil Punton

DAVID O'HANLON is a poet and occasional performer. His poems have appeared in, and are forthcoming from, numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Rialto, Elbow Room, And Other Poems, Dream Catcher, Spontaneity, Ariadne's Thread, Antiphon, Prole, Lunar Poetry, The Ofi Press, Nutshells & Nuggets and Ink Sweat & Tears. He reads and performs his work throughout the North East, including featured sets at The Stanza in Newcastle, Jibba(ish) in Whitley Bay and Poetry Jam in Durham. His V. Press publication, art brut, is his first poetry pamphlet.

ANTONY OWEN was born in 1973, Coventry, and raised by working class parents. The Nagasaki Elder is his fifth collection of poetry, inspired by growing up in Cold War Britain at the peak of nuclear proliferation and a self-funded trip to Hiroshima in 2015 to hear testimonies of Atomic bomb survivors. Owen’s war poetry and haiku have been translated into Japanese, Mandarin and Dutch. CND Peace Education (UK) selected Owen as one of their first national patrons, and he won a Peace & Reconciliation award in 2016 for Community Cohesion from his home city of Coventry.

JENNA PLEWES is a widely published and prize-winning poet. A career in psychotherapy and love of the natural world inform her work and she is at her happiest in quiet places, like the sea, mountains and moorlands. Her first full collection, Salt, was published by IDP in 2013 and a second, Pull of the Earth, in 2016. She and her husband live in Worcestershire, with their collie. They have two children and four grandchildren. Her V. Press pamphlet is Against the Pull of Time and a new collection, A Woven Rope, is forthcoming with V. Press in 2021.

MEG POKRASS is the author of six flash fiction collections and is a two-time recipient of San Francisco's Blue Light Book Award. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Wigleaf, and hundreds of magazines. Her work has been widely internationally anthologized including 2 Norton Anthology Readers and The Best Small Fictions. She currently serves as Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction 2020, Flash Challenge Editor, Mslexia, Founding Editor, New Flash Fiction Review, and Festival Curator, Flash Fiction Festival U.K.. Her new, V. Press, microfiction pamphlet is Alice In Wonderland Syndrome.

SANTINO PRINZI is Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day in the UK, Senior Editor for New Flash Fiction Review, part of the UK’s Flash Fiction Literary Festival team and a flash fiction reviewer. His debut flash fiction collection is Dots and other flashes of perception (The Nottingham Review Press) and he has short stories, flash fiction and prose poetry published/forthcoming in magazines and anthologies including Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Litro Online, (b)OINK! zine, Stories for Homes Anthology Vol.2, Jellyfish Review, and The Airgonaut. There's Something Macrocosmic About All of This is his V. Press flash fiction pamphlet.

Photo by Andy Smith

BRENDA READ-BROWN worked for many years as an IT project manager. In 2001, she gave up her high salary, company car and secure pension to be a full-time freelance writer and poet; it seemed like a good career move at the time. Winner of more than 30 slams, she has performed across the UK, in Texas and Denmark. She was selected as Gloucestershire Poet Laureate in 2012 and published her first collection, Arbitrary edges, in 2013. Her one-act plays have won several awards, including the UK-wide Geoffrey Whitworth prize. Brenda works with many groups of people, and says that helping others find their words gives her the greatest joy. Her V. Press collection is Like love.

ALEX REED is a poet living in Northumberland, who previously worked as a family therapist in NHS, voluntary sector and academic contexts. His V. Press pamphlets A Career in Accompaniment  and These nights at home  (with accompanying images by Keren Banning) explore themes of illness, care-giving and loss. Knots, tangles, fankles is his first full collection.

VICTORIA RICHARDS is a journalist, writer and senior commissioning editor at Indy Voices at The Independent. She has been: shortlisted in the Bath Novel Award and Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize; highly commended for poetry in the Bridport Prize and third in The London Magazine Short Story Competition 2017. In 2020, she came second in the Magma Poetry Competition and won the ‘Nature in the Air’ poetry competition. A selection of her work was published in 2019 in Primers: Volume Four, with Nine Arches Press. Her debut collection is You’ll need an umbrella for this (V. Press, July 2022). Follow her at www.twitter.com/nakedvix.

Photo by Rangzeb Hussain

JACQUI ROWE has four published pamphlets, including Ransom Notes. Blink is her first poetry collection. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, Bare Fiction, The Interpreter's House and Poetry Review. She's read her own poems on Radio 4's Poetry Please. For over ten years she hosted Poetry Bites at Kitchen Garden Café, Birmingham. Co-editor of award-winning press Flarestack Poets, she's a sought-after mentor for other poets and Poetry School tutor. She works extensively as a writer in health/social care settings. In 2013-14 she was Writer in Residence at Birmingham's Barber Institute of Fine Arts, where she established the creative writing programme. Since 2014 she's been Poet in Residence with Touring Consortium Theatre Company.

DIANE SIMMONS studied creative writing with The OU. She is a co-director of National Flash Fiction Day and a director of the UK Flash Fiction Festival. She has been a reader for the Bath Short Story Award, an editor for Flash Flood and has judged several flash competitions, including Flash 500 and NFFD Micro. Widely published and anthologised, she has been placed in numerous short story and flash competitions. Finding a Way, her debut flash collection on the theme of grief, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in February 2019 and was shortlisted in the 2019 Saboteur Awards. An Inheritance, a historical flash fiction novella, came out with V. Press in 2020. Her website is at https://www.dianesimmons.co.uk/.

Photo by Geoff Robinson,
2020zoom Photography

RUTH STACEY is a writer, artist, librarian and tutor. Her debut collection, Queen, Jewel, Mistress, was published by Eyewear July, 2015 and her pamphlet, Fox Boy, was published by Dancing Girl Press, June 2014. She designed the covers for most V. Press poetry titles from 2013-2020 and was part of the Vaginellas; a collective of female poets re-imagining classic forms of poetry. You can follow her on twitter @MermaidsDrown or www.ruthstacey.com. Her poems feature in the V. Press publication The Vaginellas and her second full collection is I, Ursula (V. Press 2020).

Self-portrait by Peter Tinkler

PETER TINKLER is an illustrator, fine artist and art tutor, who lives/works in Birmingham. Publications include covers for The Iceni Daughter (Shye Publishing), Maligned Species: Nettles (Fairacre Press) and Writing West Midlands poetry anthology Beyond the Wall. He's provided illustrations for collaborative projects, Being Here (St Giles Hospice Publishing) and Through the Woods (Fairacre Press), and cover art for the debut EP of Celtic rock band Torous. Peter's been involved in many exhibitions, including Urban Life at the Daniel Libeskind Space, London, and Young Artists of the Year, The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle. He's illustrator for The Old Man in the House of Bone. Peter's website is here, his blog here.

Photo by Ollie Evans

BECKY (REBECCA) VARLEY-WINTER is from the Isle of Wight, and currently lives in London. Her poetry has won the Brewer–Hall Prize and T. R. Henn Prize, been long-listed in the Eric Gregory and Foyle Young Poet of the Year Awards, and appeared in Sidekick Books’ No, Robot, No anthology, Tentacular, Rising, Poems in Which, Gadabout Press, Obsessed With Pipework, Pomegranate and Varsity. Her book Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature (Sussex Academic Press) is based on her PhD research. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing for various universities. Her poetry pamphlet is Heroines on the Blue Peninsula.

RAY VINCENT-MILLS is a recent graduate from the University of Worcester. Pre-pandemic, he used to dabble in spoken word gigs in Worcester. Mid-pandemic, he considered quitting writing, until he realised that was a silly idea and he couldn’t be in debt of a student loan for no reason. He is inspired by the odd things that white people say, the reclaiming of his own trauma and eavesdropping on strangers. This has led to his forthcoming debut poetry chapbook Creature Without Building winning the V Press Prize for Poetry in 2021.

Photo by Geoff Robinson 2020zoom

CLAIRE WALKER's poetry has been widely published including in The Interpreter’s House, Prole and The Chronicles of Eve, and shortlisted in Welshpool Poetry Festival Competition 2019. She is the author of two pamphlets published by V. Press – The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile (2015) and Somewhere Between Rose and Black (2017), which was shortlisted for Best Poetry Pamphlet in the 2018 Saboteur Awards. Her third pamphlet, Collision, was published in September 2019 by Against the Grain Poetry Press. She is co-editor of Atrium poetry webzine. Hierarchy of Needs is her V. Press poetry pamphlet written collaboratively with Charley Barnes.

Photo by Simon Morris

KATY WAREHAM MORRIS is a lecturer in Media and Culture at the University of Worcester and also contributes to the Creative Writing team. She has a particular interest in gender and queer studies, identity politics and digital humanities. Katy is currently working on her PhD research in literary gaming, play and post-queer politics, exploring interactive and innovative forms of digital poetics and their dynamic potentialities. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Inheritance (Mother’s Milk Books, 2017), won a Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. Her experimental debut collection is Cutting the Green Ribbon (Hesterglock Press, 2018). Her V. Press poetry pamphlet is Making Tracks.

LOUISE WARREN was born and grew up in the West Country and now lives in London. With a background in theatre, her first collection A Child’s Last Picture Book of the Zoo won the Cinnamon Press debut poetry competition and was published in 2012. A pamphlet In the scullery with John Keats, also published by Cinnamon, came out in 2016.  Her poems have been widely published in magazines including Ambit, The Rialto, Poetry Wales and Stand. In 2018 she won first prize in the Prole Laureate Poetry Competition with her poem ‘The Marshes’, which appears in John Dust (V. Press, 2019), her poetry pamphlet illustrated by John Duffin.

NICOLA WARWICK lives in Suffolk and works in local government. She is a member of Second Light and the Suffolk Poetry Society, whose Crabbe Memorial Poetry Competition she won in 2021. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Agenda, Acumen, Mslexia and South. Twice longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, her work embraces the natural world, folklore and relationships, sometimes in combination. Her forthcoming V. Press poetry pamphlet, The Human Portion, follows her previous one, Naming the Land (Maytree Press), inspired by her home county. She can be found on Twitter @warwick_nicola.

JOHN WHEWAY has poems in New Measure, Stand, Magma, The Warwick Review, Poetry Review, Yellow Nib, Poetry Quarterly, Compass Magazine, South Word, Agenda, The High Window, Templar anthologies and The Echoing Gallery (Redcliffe Press). His fiction is in Flash Flood 2017 & 18, Flash Fiction Festival 1&2 (Ad Hoc Fiction). He has a chapbook, The Green Table of Infinity (Anvil Press), a novella, Poborden (Faber), and a Creative Writing MA with distinction from Bath Spa. He is a psychotherapist and his V. Press title, A Bluebottle in Late October, is his debut poetry collection.

KELLY WILLIAMS is an unapologetically queer poet from Malvern, England. She has been an undergraduate student from Worcester University, completing her time there with a First Class Degree in Creative Writing and English Literature. She is interested in communicating the importance of gender fluidity, expressed in her poetry portfolio ‘ynygordna’, which explores androgyny through a third gender pronoun. As well as poetry, she works across other artistic disciplines as an aerialist, singer, pianist and photographer. Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2019, Kelly's ynygordna is her debut poetry pamphlet.

ALISON WOODHOUSE's short fiction has been widely published, including In the Kitchen (Dahlia Press), With One Eye on the Cows (Bath Flash Fiction), Beguiled by a Wild Thing (Reflex Press) and Life on the Margins (Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards). She's won/been placed in HISSAC (flash & short story), Hastings, NFFD micro, Flash 500, Biffy50, Farnham and Limnisa. Her debut novella is The House on the Corner (AdHoc Fiction). She has an MA (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University, teaches Creative Writing and is on the Bath Short Story Award team. Her V. Press flash fiction chapbook is Family Frames.

MARTIN ZARROP is a retired applied mathematician who wanted certainty but found life more interesting and fulfilling by not getting it. He started writing poetry in 2006 and can’t stop. His pamphlet No Theory of Everything (2015) was one of the winners of the 2014 Cinnamon Press pamphlet competition. His first full collection Moving Pictures was published by Cinnamon Press in 2016 and his second is Is Anyone There? (The High Window Press, 2020). His V. Press pamphlets are Making Waves Albert Einstein: Science & Life and To Boldly Go.