The State of the (Poetry) Nation

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of six literary anthologies. Her début An Aviary of Small Birds was shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis and Jerwood Prizes and was an Observer Book of the Year. Her latest, Seasonal Disturbances, explores gentrification, the city and the sacred, and was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry. In 2019 she was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral scholarship as the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA where she explored the relationship between poetry and law. Published everywhere from Granta and the Financial Times and Guardian her poetry has been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Italian, Dutch and Spanish.

Khadijah Ibrahiim is a literary activist, theatre maker and writer from Leeds. She is the founder and artistic director of Leeds Young Authors, and executive producer of the documentary ‘We Are Poets’. She and her work have appeared on BBC Radio 1Xtra, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4. Hailed as one of Yorkshire’s most prolific poets by the BBC, her work appears in multiple university journals and poetry anthologies, as well as in her own collections with publishers such as Peepal Tree Press.

Jeremy Noel-Tod teaches in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at University of East Anglia. He has reviewed poetry for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Daily Telegraph, and was the poetry critic for The Sunday Times from 2013 to 2021. He has edited the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013), the Complete Poems (2015) of R.F. Langley, and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018). He writes a weekly poetry newsletter at Some Flowers Soon.