Katrina Porteous is a poet whose work is inspired by the lives, language and ecology of the Northumberland coast. She has written extensively for radio and performance, often working in collaboration with musicians. Her words have been set for BBC Proms (2023) and the Aldeburgh Music Festival (2025).
Her work ranges from audio-visual performances for a planetarium to poetry in Northumbrian dialect: she is President of the Northumbrian Language Society. Katrina has published four collections with Bloodaxe, most recently Rhizodont (2024), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and which won the Laurel Prize for environmental poetry in 2025.

‘Katrina Porteous has always kept faith with the North East, where times of transition are intensely played out in the post-industrial landscapes. She refuses to ignore local language either, offering work adept in Northumbrian dialect, modern English, and the argot of science. Rhizodont considers deep time, extractive industry, alienation, and the efforts of communities to survive with integrity, and, in a crucial act of imagination, she speaks as other non-human entities, an ice-core, a redshank. We were impressed by the way her attention to the small and local belied the sweep and depth of her project. Rhizodont displays modern lyricism by a senior poet, loving, knowing, and authoritative.’ – Kathleen Jamie, Chair of The Laurel Prize 2025 Judges.

https://katrinaporteousdotcodotuk.wordpress.com/

What makes a poem catch an editor’s eye?
Three editors and poetry curators share in-depth insights and read some of their own work, with the opportunity for Q&A from the audience.
Do join us for what will be a fascinating discussion at the start of a New Year. We’re not offering open mic slots on this event but they’ll be back in February!

Dawn Gorman is a prize-winning poet, editor and broadcaster, with a mission to do what she can to enable others to write, perform and publish their work. She runs weekly in-person creative writing workshops (and has published two poetry-photography anthologies for her participants); runs monthly poetry workshops by email; mentors writers; offers guest poet and open mic slots on The Poetry Place on West Wilts Radio, which she devises, presents and co-produces, and she publishes poets in Caduceus Journal, where she is poetry editor. She also works with older people in residential settings, helping them write their life memories.

Her own poetry publications include The Bird Room, a poetry/photography collaboration with her late father (Hedgehog, 2023). In 2020, she co-wrote the Pushcart Prize-nominated Aloneness is a Many-Headed Bird with poet Rosie Jackson (Hedgehog Poetry Press), while Instead, Let Us Say (Dempsey & Windle, 2019), won the Brian Dempsey Award. She is widely published in poetry journals and anthologies, and has performed her work in New York, Paris, at Edinburgh Fringe and across the UK.

www.dawngorman.co.uk

Julia Deakin was born in Nuneaton The Half-Mile-High Club (2007) was a Poetry Business Competition winner and her full-length collections Without a Dog (Graft Poetry, 2008), Eleven Wonders (Graft Poetry, 2011) and Sleepless (Valley Press, 2018) impressed Anne Stevenson, Michael Symmons Roberts, Simon Armitage and Gillian Clarke respectively. She has read twice on the BBC’s Poetry Please and won recent first prizes in Poetry Archive Worldview 2022 and 2024. She edits Pennine Platform magazine.

Sharon Black is from Glasgow and lives in a remote valley of the Cévennes mountains. In 2025 she has won The Poetry Society’s inaugural Tobias Hill Prize, and 1st prizes in the Kent & Sussex Open Poetry Competition, Wells Open Poetry Competition and The Frogmore Poetry Prize. She has published 4 full collections of poetry, her latest ‘The Last Woman Born on the Island’ (Vagabond Voices, 2022), with her next collection due out with Vagabond Voices in spring 2026. She is editor of Pindrop Press.

www.sharonblack.co.uk