Poets and writers in residence

Becky Wills received an MFA from The New School and a PhD from the University of Surrey. She is the author of the prose-poem hybrid Stun: A Novel in Pieces (Tortoise Books, 2026) and runs Own Your Life Writing, a not-for-profit offering educational tools and resources to give early-stage writers the confidence, skills, and support to write their own life stories. She was an early member of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets who set up manual typewriters in public spaces to write custom poems on demand for strangers. Originally from Chicago, she is based in the UK.

James Wilkes was born in Poole in 1980. A graduate of Oxford University and UEA, he has taught English in Japan and writes art criticism. Interior Traces, a radio drama about brain imaging technologies, was broadcast in 2009. His previous publications include Ex Chaos, A DeTour (both Renscombe Press, 2006) and Reviews (Burner Veer, 2009). A selection of his work was included in the anthology Generation Txt (Penned in the Margins, 2006). In 2008 he started a PhD on the construction of landscape in the Isle of Purbeck.

Peter Jaeger is a Canadian writer based in Bristol, England. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, as well as several artist books. Jaeger has written on such diverse topics as John Cage, ecology, Marcel Proust, Zen Buddhism, and contemporary pilgrimage. Recent publications include Postamble for an Invisible Sangha (If P then Q 2021) and 10,000 Hand-Drawn Questions (Pamenar 2022). These poems are from the chapbook SELECTED MEMOIRS (above/ground press 2024).

Briony (she/her) is the 2023/2024 Poet in Residence at the University of Surrey and also teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at Royal Holloway University, where she is currently completing her PhD. Her publications include Rhizomes (Broken Sleep Books), Milk (Hem Press), Dorothy (Broken Sleep Books), Microsporidial (Sampson Low), and RHIZOME or TAPROOT (Paper View Books). Her limited-edition artists’ books have been collected by the National Poetry Library, The British Library, Senate House Library, The Bodleian, and the Kings College London Special Collections. She is editor at Osmosis Press and a co-founder of the Crested Tit Collective. Briony is an Associate Member of the Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre and a participant in the Techne Embodied Practice Group. She co-edits the How(ever) How2 Digital Archive Project at SUNY Buffalo, and the poetry feature in Resurgence and Ecologist magazine.

Selection of poems:

• 'Fowle Water' in World Literature Today
• 'It must be the water' in Permeable Barrier
• Launch of Rhizomes (Broken Sleep Books)
• 'Mudlarks' in 2019 Escapisms Exhibition (Poem Atlas).

Ian Heames runs Face Press and edits the Earthbound Poetry Series for Antonia Stringer's Earthbound Press. 

A fascinating interview with Ian addresses both his own poetry and his work as a publisher of poetry.

Samples of Ian's work can be found here: Bad Flowers (©_© Press, 2009), http://cucpress.tumblr.com
Out Of Villon (©_© Press, 2011), http://cucpress.tumblr.com

Gloss to Carriers (Critical Documents, 2011), http://plantarchy.us/gloss.html

Karenjit Sandhu is a poet, artist and teacher. Her debut poetry collection is titled young girls! (the 87 Press, 2021). Her forthcoming publication Poetic Fragments from the Irritating Archive will be published by Guillemot Press in 2022.

Karenjit’s poems appear in Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021), Writing Utopia (Hesterglock Press, 2020) and Nemeses (HVTN Press, 2019). 

Her work has also featured in Magma in collaboration with Ryan Ormonde (2020), as well as online at Murmur Reading Series (Monitor Books, 2021), Digital Poetics (the 87 Press, 2020), Junction Box (2020) and DATABLEED (2019).

Her performance work has led to collaborations with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Flat Time House and Camden People’s Theatre (London), Arnolfini (Bristol) and Galerie Eric Dupont (Paris). She is a judge for the Streetcake Writing Prize.

Publications

• young girls!
• Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry
• Writing Utopia
• Nemeses
• Magma
• Murmur Reading Series
• Digital Poetics.

Robert Kiely is a writer living in London. His poetry pamphlets include How to Read (Crater, 2017) and Killing the Cop in Your Head (Sad, 2017). Among other poetic projects, he is currently working on a prose-poetry misellany on Mars and Elon Musk. He has critical work published in the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Irish University Review, Vectors, The Parish Review, and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. 

Rob Kiely’s work has been included in the Earthbound Poetry Pamphlet series, printed with cover painting by Lucy Mayes. The 8 page pamphlet was printed in a numbered edition of 52 in Aqua Blue, Fluorescent Pink, Yellow, and Black inks. If you would like to order you can purchase here. Another pamphlet, IN IT, was published at the end of 2019 by Gang Press - email mark.jacksonmjb@blueyonder.co.uk if you'd like a copy.

Sonnet

the ingredients
were mushed up
in the cream
then poured onto a plate
and cold-fried
then she scraped them up
into rolls
and put them
in a cup
a desperate artisanal
present in regress
from passive
to active
the skills like shells removed

Verity Spott is a poet, performer and musician who lives in Brighton. Their books include Gideon (Barque Press), Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband Books), We Will Bury You (Veer), Poems (with Timothy Thornton - Face Press) The Mutiny Aboard the RV Felicity (Tipped Press) and Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press). Verity is a member of Wolf Kid Theatre and plays cello in the free jazz trio In Threads.

Sonnet

Intention stopped, or non-intent’s desire -

the glint you won’t abide yourself to need;

throw out my love for you in its first fire,

without an inch of self to intercede.

Because I was a child, I fell away

impressed, first real, then in gradients’ mourning.

A novice vision broke in greedy play;

criminal relations heaving, scorning

all sense corrupted from one dead stuck lip.

Integrated singly rinking: Bypassed

molded to the leg. Nurture, co-sign, drip

all emptied from your head like sinking glass.

Tight below the deck where sleeps your wonder

creaks the surface scorn you left to plunder.

 James Davies is the author of several works of poetry including Plants, A Dog, Snow and Acronyms.

His most recent title stack, published by Carcanet, is a volume-length poem which documents a range of minimal interventions – doings familiar and unfamiliar.  A novel, When Two Are in Love or As I Came to Behind Frank’s Transporter, co-written with Philip Terry, is forthcoming in 2018 from Crater Press. He edits the poetry press if p then q and co-organises The Other Room reading series in Manchester. His ongoing experiences of drawing yellow lines on sheets of A4 paper and filing them into brown cardboard boxes can be viewed on Youtube.

See James' website

Jo Lindsay Walton writes poetry, fiction, and neither. His work has appeared in publications such as Damn the Caesars, Intercapillary Space, Quid, Plantarchy, Anything Anymore Anywhere, Onedit, Veer Away, Materials, and the yt communications bulletins, under various names including Jow Lindsay, Francis Crot, and Megan Zword.

He's also written some poetry chapbooks, and the paranormal romance novel Invocation (Critical Documents 2013). With Samantha Walton, he edits the small press Sad Press, and with Joe Luna, he edits the poetry reviews magazine Hix Eros.

Prudence Chamberlain recently finished her PhD in the poetics of flippancy and feminism at Royal Holloway, where she now lectures in creative writing.

Her poems have been published in 3:AM, HYSTERIA, Poems in Which, Lunar Poetry and Jungtfak with a collaborative work forthcoming in Country Music. She is a poetry editor for the feminist collective and periodical, HYSTERIA, and an associate of POLYply, a series of avant-garde interdisciplinary events. She is also a member of Generative Constraints, an arts committee that hosts dialogic events and workshops, as well as doing performances, most recently in the Vault Festival at London Waterloo. She is currently working on a Disney collaboration with SJ Fowler and her first collection, I sit on your face in Parliament Square, is forthcoming with Knives, Forks and Spoons Press.

Tickle Porn

You power-walk, I run if I am chased

and demarcate my exit strategies

with gaffer tape we bought with

the worst intentions.

We used to wildfire these streets like one

of us was alight and I miss your cigarettes

now that you are a Sunday jogger and

I am forever a screaming dog meme

off the back of your charm

at corporate social responsibility events.

I come home, weave an ethically sourced

banana through your muesli oats and

acknowledge I am trapped in Monday’s routine

all the while looking for love blood and marriage.

When you get in and take off your work

we decide our sex should be more visceral

and you would like to experiment with

the vast potentialities of instant coffee

in contact with bodily fluids. 

I go about my Tuesday caffeinated from the waist down. 

When I text about my energised thighs

you reply:

“the metadata feeding the analytics

is skewing our entire catalogue of results.

x”

I reply that metanarratives died in the postmodern

massacre of ’99 so how did metadata make it out

alive?

You don’t get it; we fundamentally misunderstand

one another

torn against our wanting time

and sex and commitment and payment. 

That evening you get under my ribs

and around my back, tying my calves in

locks with your trying and gestures

until we are innocence in experience

us two and I lash out hard,

kick you in the eyebrow and out of bed. 

You do Thursday and Friday in the office

with an inexplicable black eye and I feel lighter

amongst the remembered laughter of your hands.

Brunch is not a human right and

we should be crying  for everything

on Saturday morning but we eat

preserved lemons and avocado on sourdough

shore up out first-world

which is in the kitchen

with your long hair and my exposed knees

and the weekend together.

Nicholas Johnson usually writes long poems and assemblages. They include The Lard Book, a gargantuan visual book on tracing paper in a silver case.

This was occasioned by the upside-down handwriting of clairvoyant NY poet Hannah Weiner and the 1996 BSE crisis. Listening to the Stones is a key English post-colonial poem about French occupation in New Caledonia, that led to the Heinghene and Ouvea massacres. Cleave tells of the carnage of Foot and Mouth, the first agricultural plague of 21st century Europe. Haul Song is his best known work, a lyric poem set in the slower, older, rural world, the bankruptcy corridor of 1970s farming Devon.

He has had 4 visual and sound poems published by Bob Cobbing's writers forum. Over the last two decades he has curated festivals, writers tours and made books at Etruscan Books. He has been a contributor of obituaries to The Independent. He was writer in residence at Arnolfini, Bristol for Starting at Zero, Black Mountain College.

His interests are in film, writing and music, evidenced publicly by his Black Huts Festival in Hastings. His writing concerns are in sound based performance, lyric, neoligism and oddities of character and speech, landscape and seafret.

During his residency, he will run workshops open to all English and Creative Writing undergraduates and postgraduates, as well as the Surrey Poetry Festival. 

The Song of the Star is Born

The icicle cannot pierce deeper than it has.

Lynette Roberts

Easter Sunday, eastertide; precious trellis

Of blood and sinew it all lies racked and

Despoiled on bordery hills nailed as delicat indices

To Dartmoor north : peewit rise

To sing godeletti

The light-beaten down-stream

Hurtling thru’ overhang lychens, Lutyens, Lutyens

it calls : in the hameau an Easter table

decorated with papaya, guava; cherries from other

Continents; marzipan

airstreams. Bells peal 'now it is civilised morning'

Intact, my cheeks fill with smiled acceptances

Light put on dimwit shoes

Coil round fruitbush throats      

Klipperty klöpp, the Mollys, hooves and the hands, ‘There is’, Philip

Glanville said, ‘names for most fields’. Peewit

circles over tadpoles in a dewpond : amphibions : 

renette, rana

at Deckport Farm

where Ravilious photographed in '79; contemplate

the shoal

air makes from light jetted from sun

on slopes of the world.

last night I woke tolisten

And remembered Nova fresh haired and lovely faced

the sound of the plantation,

I looked round the door into the kitchen

but Nova had already left, “hello you'm gone quiet”

She died at the finish.

Who walks in the hoary frost?

there stood Nova, lovely faced

hair like

the back of a

leek

you did break my heart

Jèssica Pujol Duran (Barcelona, 1982), BA Comparative Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; MA Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture and Thought at University of Sussex; is currently a PhD candidate at University College London. Her thesis is on Intercultural Studies, and she is working on the experimentalisms of Julio Cortázar and Italo Calvino in the 1960-1970s Paris.

Contemporary british poetry, translation studies and the avant-gardes are among her interests. She is the editor of the magazine Alba Londres, a magazine on translation, poetry and literature focused on Spanish and Latin American Culture. She is also a poet and has written and translated in Catalan, English and Spanish poets such as Lisa Robertson, Tim Atkins and Amy De’Ath.

Her poetry and translations have been published in different magazines such as Onedit, Crater, Alba Londres, Infinite Editions and Summerstock; and anthologies such as The Dark Would: anthology of language art and Donzelles de l’any 2000 (Editorial Mediterrànea).

Her first book in English, Now Worry was published by Department in April 2012, and her collection Every Bit of Light by Oystercatcher Press in November 2012.

Stephen Mooney is Poetry Coordinator at the University of Surrey.

Since 2014, Stephen has taken on the organisation of the October Morag Morris Poetry Lecture, the Surrey New Year Poetry Reading, and is co-organiser, with the poet-in-residence, of the annual Surrey Poetry Festival. Stephen teaches innovative poetry and creative writing at undergraduate and postgraduate level and is himself a practising poet. His most recent book is The Cursory Epic (Contraband Books, 2014). He co-runs the UK-based small poetry press Veer Books.

Stephen's poems

• The Wold Shadow/Anticipation of The Night
• Your TV License number is
• The Cursory Epic Pt 2 - Kharé - Cityport of Traps.

Sophie Robinson’s creative and critical work has been published in a number of journals and anthologies including Pilot, How2, Dusie, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008), and Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman Books 2010).

Her publications include Killin’ Kittenish (yt communications 2006), a (Les Fugues Press 2009), and Lotion (Oystercatcher Press 2010). From 2010 to 2011 Sophie was poet-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Sophie currently lives in London, where she is undertaking research into Queer Poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Sonnet 101

why is everybody always writing

about fucking like me the more writing

to be done the less time to do the

necessary fucking for poetry

which is just as well when “at a bar” or

side by side alone & almost having

sex but in the end we change our minds ‘cos

work is early/harsh work makes you nervous

lines up the days & besides you don’t love

each other so much today as yesterday

& that dwindle’s dampened the itch to do

anything but write some stupid sonnet

frigid at the kitchen table no damp

itch to speak of no great love to leap off.

Amy De'Ath was born in Suffolk in 1985. She studied American Literature with Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and at Temple University in Philadelphia, before moving to Australia and then to London.

Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals in the UK and US, including Esque, Onedit, QUID, and The Rialto. Crater Press published her broadside, Andromeda, The World Works for Me, and her work features in the Salt Best Younger Poets 2011 anthology. Her first collection, Erec & Enide, was published by Salt in Dec 2010 and her second collection, Caribou, by Bad Press in 2011. Amy currently lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Happy Automatism

I imagine myself working      lighting up

a Bubble Act                sitting in the sunshine

like a millionaire      tripping in the fake world

tripping in the real world as it came

back towards evening. Hemmed in

by my own appendix    foamy. Trying

to take a bath in something holistic or

to live in stark relief as you do sometimes, not

cuddling the song I invented. Crushed. I’m

a very conventional person, you can make

a relation with me, vegetarian because

I hate animals               the memory sour grapes

the doubtful animals:   who they are

and what they do          is worse than sentences

and I am worse at work than I ever was

we don’t need radicalization      or even want to be

funny, while art and the world is not not soft

I want worser worlds   than I ever was

caustic little drifter on the grand canal

do make up in the loo like you do         like you

Award-winning novelist Neel Mukherjee started his Writer in Residence post with us in October 2021. He grew up in India, studying English at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, going on to attend Oxford College and receiving his PhD from Pembroke College in Cambridge.

Novels Neel has written are, A Life Apart (2010), The Lives of Others (2014) and A State of Freedom (2017). He has also written a book for the Cahier Series, Avian, which was published in 2020.

He was awarded the Encore Award from the Royal Society of Literature for The Lives of Others, shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017.

Read the full article about Neel Mukherjee.

Distinguished Writer in Residence

Distinguished Writer in Residence