Five

Laura Potts is a poet and writer of radio drama from West Yorkshire. Laura began to write poetry at an early age, winning The Foyle Young Poets Award twice during her school days. While at university, she moved to Swansea to work at The Dylan Thomas Birthplace and write for The Dylan Thomas Society. Her work has appeared in Agenda, The Moth, The Poetry Business Book of New Poets, Aesthetica and Poetry Ireland Review in recent years. In 2017, as one of the BBC's New Voices, she was commissioned to write radio drama for BBC Radio 3. Her first production, North and Mourning, featured the voice of Carnegie-Medal winner Berlie Doherty and was broadcast on The Christmas Verb. Laura has been the recipient of awards including The Foyle Young Poets Award, The Bristol Poetry Prize and The Mother's Milk Writing Prize. She received a commendation from The Poetry Society in 2018. Her most recent commissions have been for BBC Radio, The International Anthony Burgess Foundation and The King's Chapel in London. Laura was shortlisted for The Edward Thomas Fellowship, The Bridport Prize and The Rebecca Swift Women's Poetry Prize in 2020. She was a finalist for The Manchester Poetry Prize in 2021. Prerana Kumar is an Indian poet who has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. She has also completed an MA in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature from Durham University with a focus on South-Asian poetics. She was recently digital poet-in-residence for The Poetry Business and has been shortlisted for Nine Arches Press' Primers scheme and The White Review Poet's Prize 2022. She has been published in Magma, Barren, and Ink Sweat & Tears. She writes about how identity hinges on home, language, memory, desire, and the tenuousness of intergenerational inheritance First. Ruth Yates lives in Sheffield. Four times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her poems have been shortlisted for the Eric Gregory Award and Disabled Poets Prize; highly commended in the Resurgence Poetry Prize; and commended in the Verve Poetry Festival Competition. Her poems have appeared in Cadaverine, Route 57, Mslexia Writing Squad booklet, Carmen et Error, Pennine Platform and The North, and in anthologies including Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets and Like Flyering for the Revolution: The Verve Anthology of Protest. She was commissioned to produce work for Manchester Festival of Libraries in 2021, in collaboration with creative technologist Chris Ball, The Writing Squad, and Future Everything; and has collaborated in online projects including 'A Diary of Windows and Small Things' and 'Staying Home'. Helen Bowell is a poet, producer, editor, critic, writer (you name it) currently based in London. Her debut pamphlet The Barman is published with Bad Betty Press and traces a relationship with an unnamed barman backwards through time. Along with fellow Squad writer Jasmine Simms and artist Lily Arnold, she is a co-director of Dead [Women] Poets Society, a live literature organisation which 'resurrects' women poets of the past, currently on an Arts Council England funded national tour. In this role, she co-guest-edited the Autumn 2020 Modern Poetry in Translation focusing on dead women poets. Helen is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, and an alumna of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, London Writers Awards, and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. She was a commended Foyle Young Poet in 2010 and 2011. In 2020, she won the Bronze Creative Future Writers' Award and in 2021 was commended in the Mslexia Poetry Competition. She was Poetry Business's digital Poet in Residence February 2021. Her poems have appeared in bath magg, Poetry Birmingham, The Willowherb Review, harana poetry, Ambit, The Fenland Reed, Strix, Manchester Review, Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets (2017) and elsewhere. She works at The Poetry Society.