5th September, Waterstones, Manchester, Free, 4pm

‘Patricia Farrell is a poet and visual artist. She co-organised the SubVoicive reading series in the early 80s and was a member of the arts group New River Project. She has collaborated with other writers, artists and musicians on a range of projects and publications: most notably the poets Robert Sheppard and Joanne Ashcroft, the jeweller and installation artist Jivan Astfalck, on the projectB*twixst, and Jennifer Cobbing on the dance piece, A Space Completely Filled with Matter (recently published by Veer Publications as a visual text sequence). Her work is published in magazines and collections, as well as individual pamphlets: most recently, Seven Bays of Spirituality (Knives Forks and Spoons Press). She completed a PhD thesis in 2011 on poetic artifice in philosophical writing. Her collection, The Zechstein Sea, was published by Shearsman Books in 2013.’

Sarah Hesketh is a poet and freelance project manager. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and is the author of two collections of poetry Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf (Penned in the Margins, 2009) and The Hard Word Box: A Poet’s Exploration of Dementia and Ageing. (Penned in the Margins, 2014). In 2013-14 she was a poet in residence with Age Concern. In 2015 she was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to write Grains of Light, a sequence based on the life of holocaust survivor Eve Kugler.

Alan Baker grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and has lived in Nottingham since 1985, where he is editor of poetry publisher Leafe Press and its associated magazine Litter. His latest poetry collections are “all this air and matter” (Oystercatcher) and “Whether” (KFS)

Joanne Ashcroft has a BA Creative Writing and English, Edge Hill University 2008 and an MA Creative Writing, Edge Hill University 2010. She was joint winner of the inaugural Rhiannon Evans Poetry Scholarship 2010. From Parts Becoming Whole (The Knives Forks Spoons Press, 2011) is her first collection of poetry. Joanne was winner of Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize 2012. Her pamphlet Maps and Love Songs for Mina Loy is available from Seren.  With Patricia Farrell she co-authored Conversational Nuisance, an A3 size directional poster poem with anthropomorphised rabbit insignia, released this year by Zimzalla.