Petter pending

Perhaps the best compliment a writer can receive is that their work inspires that of another. The author of the fictionalised memoir All the Beautiful Liars, Sylvia Petter, has written this creative non-fiction response to Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York, and she's got another response pending publication.

Gage interview

 

The Berg Collection Reading Room at New York Public Library. 

 

June is Pride Month! So happy that radical lesbian playwright, actor and activist Carolyn Gage interviewed me about my debut poetry pamphlet Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York, and we also talked about Betweenity, my graphic biography of Mary Taylor, and so much more.

Leicester uni-storming

My thanks to Dr Jonathan Taylor for posting about Beerstorming with Charlotte Bronte in New York on the University of Leicester Creative Writing Blog.

Beerstorming

 

 

It's publication day - my debut poetry chapbook is here! 

My grandest thanks go to my brilliant publisher Sara Lefsyk of The Ethel Zine and Micro Press for making this dream of mine come true! Sitting up all night on the settee with a two month old on my breast when I submitted my poems, publication seemed as elusive as sleep. I'm forever grateful to Sara for bringing my chapbook into the world.

YA listing

Could not be more stoked to have the news that the YA novel I wrote over lockdown last year made the long-list of 12 out of over a hundred entries for the Michael Gifkins Unpublished Novel Competition. It's my second time in this position, having also had Some Things the English, the novel that placed second in the Dundee International Book Prize, in the long-list in the inaugural comp.

Guardian Books

 My mini review of Becky Manawatu's Auē is in The Guardian.

Disquiet

 

"Thank you for submitting to the 2021 Disquiet Literary Contest. We received over a thousand entries for this year's contest, many of them of exceptional quality. While we're sorry to say that your entry was not selected to be one of this year's winners, you should know that out of an impressive pool of work, yours made it all the way to the final judges on the shortlist.

In fact, our readers thought your entry skillfully wields the simplicity of its images to make for a vivid, enveloping reading experience. Rather than stretching language through syntactical feats, you trust the humble sentence to relay meaning in a way that is effective and clear. The world exists in your poems from the first line. The pacing [...] is emblematic of what these poems manage to do: make us feel, in transit, that we’ve found some stillness. We hope to see much more of your work in the future."

Fairly stoked to receive this feedback on top of my shortlisting!