Poets

Isabelle Baafi

Isabelle Baafi is a writer, poet and filmmaker from London. She received a BA in Comparative Literature and Film from the University of Kent. She was the winner of the 2019 Vincent Cooper Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. She was also Commended in the 2020 Verve Poetry Competition. She is currently a member of the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme (2019–20).

Her work has been featured in Lammergeier, petrichor, Kalahari Review, Allegro, Moko Magazine, AFREADA, Litro and Riggwelter Press; has been anthologised by Verve Poetry Press, Brittle Paper and The Caribbean Writer; and is forthcoming in Magma, Finished Creatures, Scriptus, Anthropocene, Sister Uncut: Resist, Broken Sleep Books, and The Poetry Review. To correspond with the publication of her poem 'hotboxing' in The Poetry Review, Isabelle wrote a 'Behind the Poem' essay that you can find on the Poetry Society's website, where you can also read the poem itself.

She has performed at numerous venues and festivals, including Westminster Reference Library, the Barbican, the Verve Poetry Festival, and the Battersea Arts Centre’s Homegrown Festival. She is currently working on her debut poetry collection.

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Clementine Burnley

Clementine E Burnley is a Cameroon-born British writer who lives in Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in Emma Press’ Anthology of Britain, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Magma, and The Poetry Review. She’s an alumnus of Obsidian Foundation, Purple Hibiscus Workshop, and an Edwin Morgan Grantee.

Mary Jean Chan

Mary Jean Chan is a poet from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in The 2018 Forward Book of Poetry, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Ambit Magazine, The Rialto, The London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Callaloo Journal, The Scores, Bare Fiction Magazine, Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, The Kindling and elsewhere. She has poetry forthcoming from Wasafiri Magazine, Magma and English: Journal of the English Association (Oxford Academic).

In 2017, Mary Jean was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and won the Poetry Society Members' Competition and the Poetry and Psychoanalysis Competition. In 2016, she won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (ESL), and was shortlisted for the 2016 London Magazine Poetry Prize, the 2016 Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition and the 2016 Resurgence Poetry Prize.

Mary Jean served as Vice-President of the Oxford University Poetry Society from 2014-2015, and attended poetry workshops at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Oxford. She received the 2015 University of London MA Creative Writing Prize, and is currently a PhD candidate and Research Associate in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Mary Jean's article on Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric was recently published by The Journal of American Studies (2017). She is the winner of the 2017 PSA/Journal of Postcolonial Writing Postgraduate Essay Prize on Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion.

Mary Jean is a Co-Editor at Oxford Poetry, and is represented by literary agent Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander Associates. Her most recent book is Fléche (Faber, 2019), winner of the Costa Poetry Prize 2019 and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

A Hurry of English was the Poetry Book Society's Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2018, and you can read reviews of the pamphlet on Sphinx (two reviews), Still Loud, Dundee University Review of the Arts, Harana Poetry, and in the Glasgow Review of Books.

In this video, Mary Jean reads Long Distance, a poem from her pamphlet A Hurry of English, published by ignitionpress (2018). Video recorded at the Society Cafe, Oxford, 8 March 2018, by David Bullock.

Patrick Errington

Patrick James Errington is a writer, translator, and researcher from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. As an undergrad at the University of Alberta (2007–2011), he studied English literature and creative writing with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. He received his MFA from Columbia University (2013–2015) in creative writing and literary translation, where he also received a Program Scholarship and a Chair’s Fellowship.

He has worked as an editor or editorial assistant for magazines like The New Yorker and The Columbia Journal, and is currently the editor-in-chief of The Scores, an online literary magazine based at The University of St Andrews.

Patrick is currently a George Buchanan PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and his research, under the supervision of Professors John Burnside and Don Paterson, is in the field of poetics and hermeneutics, examining cognitive metaphor, embodied/enactive mind theory, and postcritical response with particular regard to how readers are activated by and respond to contemporary poetry.

Patrick’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Passages North, Oxford Poetry, CV2, The London Magazine, Long Poem Magazine, Best New Poets 2016, The Iowa Review, Horsethief, West Branch, The Adroit Journal, Cider Press Review, DIAGRAM, American Literary Review and others. He was also Commended in The National Poetry Competition 2016, and won, among others, The London Magazine Poetry Competition (2016) and the Wigtown Poetry Competition (2017).

Together with Laure Gall, Patrick also translated Au creux de la main (The Hollow of the Hand), by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy (Paris: Éditions l’Âge d’Homme, 2017).

You can read reviews of Patrick's pamphlet on the Sphinx website and in the Dundee Review of the Arts. Patrick's poem 'Half-Measures' was also the subject of two of the winning entries in the Poetry Centre's first poetryfilm competition, and you can watch the films (by Gabrielle Turner and Marie Craven).

In this video, Patrick reads In the Event of Winter, a poem from his pamphlet Glean, published by ignitionpress (2018). Video recorded at the Society Cafe, Oxford, 8 March 2018, by David Bullock.

Joanna Ingham

Joanna Ingham grew up in Suffolk and now lives in Hertfordshire. Her work has been published in Ambit, Brittle Star, Envoi, The Fenland Reed, Iota, Lighthouse, Magma, Mslexia, The North and Under the Radar. Her poems have also appeared in the anthology The Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt) and in 'Poet's Corner' in The Sunday Times. She won second prize in BBC Wildlife magazine's Wildlife Poet of the Year Competition 2008. She studied creative writing at Birkbeck College and was awarded the Michael Donaghy Prize for Poetry on graduating. In 2017 she was a poet-in-residence at London Open Garden Squares Weekend.

Joanna also writes fiction and is represented by Thérèse Coen of Hardman & Swainson. She has facilitated creative writing workshops in a wide variety of settings including schools, day-centres for older people, prisons, drop-in centres for homeless and vulnerable adults, and with young and adult carers.

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Mia Kang

Mia Kang writes poems and other perversions. Named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest by Mónica de la Torre, her writing has appeared in journals including POETRY, Washington Square Review, Narrative Magazine, and PEN America.

A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and runner-up for the 2019 and 2017 Discovery Poetry Contests, she is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ 2016 Catalina Páez and Seumas MacManus Award, among others. Mia is a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, where she studies the contested rise of multiculturalism and its failures.

You can read a review of Mia's pamphlet, City Poems, on the Sphinx website here.

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Alycia Pirmohamed

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet currently living in Scotland. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying figurative homelands in poetry written by second-generation immigrant writers of South Asian descent. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. In 2018, Alycia’s chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind was selected by Camille Rankine for the BOAAT Press Chapbook Prize. Her other awards include the 92/Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest in Poetry, the Adroit Journal’s Djanikian Scholars program, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications internationally, including The Paris Review Daily, Prairie Schooner, Best Canadian Poetry, Gutter Magazine, and The London Magazine, among others.

Alycia is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets, co-founder of The Scottish BAME Writers Network, and a submission reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She has received support from The Royal Society of Literature, and from Calgary Arts Development via The City of Calgary.

Alycia's pamphlet, Hinge, was placed second in the 2020 Michael Marks Poetry Award and was the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2020. You can read a review of the pamphlet on the Sphinx website.

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Zein Sa'dedin

Zein Sa'dedin is a poet, editor, and educator from and currently based in Amman, Jordan. She is the founding editor-in-chief of BAHR // بحر - an online literary and creative platform dedicated to championing writers and artists from SWANA in all their languages. Zein holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews and a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She currently teaches English language as well as the occasional writing workshop. Zein is also working to establish a bilingual literary journal from, within, and for SWANA and the Levant. Her poem, ‘the sea is the most flexible of things,’ was the recipient of the 2019 Third Coast Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in harana poetry, The Shuruq Festival, Zarf Poetry, Third Coast Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Sukoon Magazine, Jaffat el Aqlam, and others.

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Jennifer Lee Tsai

Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, editor and critic. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. She completed undergraduate studies in English Language and Literature at the University of St Andrews and also holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Liverpool. In 2015, she completed an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with Distinction from the University of Manchester.

Jennifer is a fellow of the nationally acclaimed poetry development programme The Complete Works III which was founded by the writer and activist, Bernardine Evaristo. In 2017, Jennifer was selected as a Ledbury Poetry Critic. She was a runner-up in the 2018 inaugural Bi’an Awards in Poetry.

Her poems are published in numerous magazines and journals including Ambit, Magma, Oxford Poetry, The Rialto, Soundings, SMOKE, Wild Court and featured in the anthologies Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe: 2017) and Islands Are But Mountains: New Poetry from the UK (Platypus Press, 2019).

As a poetry critic, her reviews are published by The Poetry School, and in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Modern Poetry In Translation, Ambit and The Poetry Review.

Jennifer is an Associate Editor of SMOKE magazine and a Contributing Editor to Ambit.

She has worked extensively as a teacher and lecturer of English as a Foreign Language in universities, colleges and community settings in the UK and abroad, and has also regularly led creative writing workshops across the country.

Currently, she is an AHRC-funded PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool.

You can read reviews of Jennifer’s pamphlet Kismet in The Poetry Review, on the Sphinx website, and in the journal, Mediapart.

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Natalie Whittaker

Natalie Whittaker is from South East London, where she works as a secondary school teacher. She studied English at New College, Oxford.

Her poems have been published in Poetry News, Brittle Star, Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, #MeToo: A Women’s Poetry Anthology and South Bank Poetry.

Natalie was awarded second place in the Poetry on the Lake short poem competition 2018 and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2017.

You can read reviews of Natalie's pamphlet on the Poetry School website and on the Sphinx website. Natalie's poem 'Moss' was the subject of one of the prizewinning poetryfilms in the inaugural competition run by the Poetry Centre. 

Watch the film by Jane Glennie

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