A reading
with CHRISSY WILLIAMS, ROY MCFARLANE, ZENA EDWARDS and IAN DUHIG
The Civic, Hanson St, Barnsley, S79 2HZ
Wednesday 24 May
7.30pm to 9.10pm
£10 / £8 conc. (from The Civic box office – click here or phone 01226 327000)

Ian Duhig has written seven books of poetry, most recently The Blind Roadmaker (Picador 2016) which was shortlisted for the Roehampton, Forward Best Collection and TS Eliot Prizes. A former homelessness worker, Duhig still often works with socially excluded groups on writing projects and is currently developing a piece for Refugee Tales. Duhig is also an anthologised short story writer, in which capacity he was a joint winner of a Shirley Jackson Award. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Cholmondeley Award recipient, Duhig has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once and the National Poetry Competition twice.
Twitter: @ianduhig

Raised in Tottenham, North London, Zena Edwards has been involved in poetry and live literature performance for 24 years. She has been nominated for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships award 2017, was nominated for the Arts Foundation Award for Performance Poetry 2013, and won the Hidden Creatives Award 2012. Zena’s writing for performance explores collective and personal revolution, re-membering that which has been dismantled, and the continuum of the African diaspora pre- and post-colonial canon and narrative. After graduating from Middlesex University in Drama and Communication Studies, Zena has been involved in writing for performance for 20 years and is Creative Director of Verse In Dialog, a social enterprise company focused on poetry in cross art collaboration for social change. Website: http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com

Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and spent most of his years living in Wolverhampton. He has held the role of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, and that of Poet in Residence for Starbucks and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Roy was highly commended by the Forward Prize for Papers, published in the Forward Book of Poetry 2017. Other anthologies include Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe) and he is the writer and editor of Celebrate Wha? Ten Black British Poets from the Midlands (Smokestack). His first full collection, Beginning With Your Last Breath, is published by Nine Arches Press (2016).

Chrissy Williams is a poet and editor living in London. She has published various poetry pamphlets and her first full collection BEAR is out from Bloodaxe this year. She is director of the annual Free Verse: Poetry Book Fair and also works as editor on the bestselling comic series The Wicked + The Divine.