Members
St. Mungo’s Mirrorball has over 100 members, find out more about them below, and by clicking on their names:
Chris Agee
Chris Agee is a poet, essayist, photographer and editor. He was born in San Francisco on a US Navy hospital ship and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. After high school at Phillips Academy Andover and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France, he attended Harvard University and since graduation has lived in Ireland. His first two collections of poems were In the New Hampshire Woods (The Dedalus Press, 1992) and First Light (The Dedalus Press, 2003). He was editor of Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (Bloodaxe Books, 1998), Unfinished Ireland: Essays on Hubert Butler (Irish Pages, 2003), The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland (Wake Forest University Press, 2008) and The Other Tongues: An Introduction to Writing in Irish, Scots Gaelic and Scots in Ulster and Scotland (Irish Pages, 2013) . His third collection, Next to Nothing (Salt, 2008), was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon (The Irish Pages Press), appeared in 2018. He is the Editor of Irish Pages, and edited Balkan Essays (The Irish Pages Press, 2016), the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays, published simultaneously in Croatian by the Zagreb publishing house Fraktura. His latest poetic work, Trump Rant, has just appeared (The Irish Pages Press, 2021). He was the Keith Wright Literary Fellow (Writer-in-Residence) at the University of Strathclyde between 2013 and 2015. He lives in Belfast, and divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia. On Blue Sandbar Moon: “I think it is a monumental work ranging across the European landscape and the deepest inner worlds”. – David Park, novelist
Katie Ailes is a researcher, artist, and producer focusing on performance-based poetry. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of Strathclyde on authenticity in contemporary UK spoken word. She organises events, performs, and tours with Scottish company I Am Loud Productions (Loud Poets). Katie was mentored by Liz Lochhead through the 2015-16 Clydebuilt programme. She released her first collection, Homing, in 2015, and was published in the House of Three anthology series in 2016. Her poem “Outwith” was chosen as one of the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems of 2016.
Gilbert Alomenu is a multiple-prizewinning writer, having won prizes for prose and poetry, including 3rd prize in the Rotary Club Essay Competition and most recently the Kirke White Poetry Prize. As part of the conditions of the prize a copy of the 14 poems which collectively won the prize is held in the archives of the University Of Nottingham Library. Gilbert’s articles have been published widely in newspapers and magazines such as The Times and The Sunday Times, and his poetry has also been published in various outlets such as Poetry Nottingham and Agrimag. He was a contributor (along with some 49 others!) to a poem written at the 2005 Edinburgh Book Festival ‘A Magic Spell For The Far Journey’ (published as a pamphlet by Puppet State Press). He has performed his poetry at the Bongo Club in Edinburgh and at various venues in Glasgow including The Rio Cafe, Sammy Dow’s and Tchai Ovna. In 2015 Gilbert performed his poetry at 3 different events at the Aye Write! festival at The Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and also performed one of his poems at the fundraiser for the refurbishment of the Scottish Poetry Library, which took place at Tell it Slant/The Project Cafe, Glasgow.
Chris Athorne
Chris Athorne is a mathematician, living in Glasgow. He has a minimalist website at: https://chrisathorne.wordpress.com/
William Bonar (1953-2021)
William Bonar graduated MLitt in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Glasgow University (2008) and he was tutored by Liz Lochhead as part of the “North Star” cohort of the Clydebuilt apprenticeship scheme (2010-11). He was shortlisted in 2015 for a New Writers Award. His pamphlet, Offering, (available from www.redsquirrelpress.com) received the James Kirkup Memorial Award in 2014. His poems have been included in the Scottish Poetry Library’s online anthology, Best Scottish Poems, in both 2012 and 2016. He was a founder member and committee member of St Mungo’s Mirrorball.
Eunice Buchanan is a retired schoolteacher, just before her eighties she completed an M.Phil and then a PhD in Creative Writing at Glasgow University under the splendid direction of Tom Leonard. She writes short stories and poems, often in Scots – some of which have either won or figured in the prize-list of the McCash competition. Eunice’s small book of poems, “As far as I can see” won a first equal in the Saltire First Book Competition.
Jim Carruth has brought out six well-received pamphlet collections of poetry since his first, Bovine Pastoral in 2004. He has won both the James McCash poetry competition and McLellan poetry prize and was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2009. He was appointed Glasgow Poet Laureate in July 2014 and his collection Prodigal won the 2015 Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. In 2015 his first book “Killochries” was published by Freight press.
Christine Cather
Christine received an MSc in Information and Library Studies (2007) while volunteering at Glasgow Women’s Library, her research topic was Bibliotherapy. A community librarian for many years, poet and fiction reader, NHS Education for Scotland employed her to assist in a development of a broad bibliotherapy project in Scotland. During the last 9 years she has fostered a sizeable interest across health, social care, literary and library sectors in Scotland. Her main interests are: being a great Granny; publishing her first poetry pamphlet this year; writing an introduction to creative bibliotherapy (that means using texts of either imaginative literature or non-fiction texts which can be read aloud, discussed and written about.); bringing more and more reading and writing across Scotland and beyond! She leads an expressive writing group in the Maggie’s Lanarkshire centre and wishes to facilitate more groups in a variety of settings, aimed at spreading the benefits of reading and engagement, social inclusion and enjoyment. As well as founding and being a Director of Wee Read Community Interest Company, she is now a Community Champion in Lanarkshire for the See Me in Scotland campaign. Read more at website www.weeread.scot @wee_read www.facebook.com/weeread.scot/
A C Clarke’s fifth full collection, A Troubling Woman (Oversteps Books), centred on Margery Kempe, came out in 2017. She was one of four winners in the Cinnamon Press 2017 pamphlet competition with War Baby. She has worked with the poets Maggie Rabatski and Sheila Templeton on a series of poems in Gaelic, Scots and English, her own contribution being in English. A second collection of these poems is due out this year. She is currently working on an extensive series of poems about Gala Éluard, later Gala Dalí and the Surrealist circles in which she moved. The first set of these is due to be published as a pamphlet by Tapsalteerie in 2021.
Rachel Clive
Rachel Clive is a writer, theatre practitioner and researcher with a particular interest in writing for performance. She started writing poetry as a (prize-winning) performance poet and went on to publish poetry in journals and books such as Poetry Wales and In Her Mind’s Eye. She has over the last ten years been particularly interested in developing collaborative, cross-disciplinary and group writing processes and has been honoured to have been able to do so with a huge variety of people in many different contexts such as prisons, theatres (Tramway, The Arches, Citizens Theatre, Oran Mor, CCA) libraries, health centres, schools and gardens. She has written, directed, co-written, facilitated and devised with many others a multitude of plays, poems, songs, stories and cross-art-form pieces – some commissioned, some published, some prize-winning and almost all performed, whether intimately or professionally. She has a deep and lifetime interest in questions of dis/ability and is increasingly interested in developing environmental and ecological writing and performance practices.
Penny Cole lives on the southside of Glasgow. She writes poems and short stories and has had a few of them published but is very much a learner. She has a creative writing degree from Kingston University, and earns her living as a voluntary/third sector development consultant. She is also Environment Editor of A World to Win and co-author of Running a Temperature, and Action Plan for the Eco-crisis (2008) and Fracking Capitalism (2014).
Frances Corr began writing in a community group many years ago. She has since written plays, short stories and poetry. She is also an artist and in latter years has completed a BA Hons in Painting at Glasgow School of Art as well as the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University.
Gillian Dawson
Gillian Dawson works in a university library. A member of Clydebuilt 12 mentored by John Glenday, she was shortlisted for the Wigtown Poetry Prize 2020and was winner of the Gutter and Edwin Morgan Trust ‘All Things Are Possible’ Poetry Competition 2021. Please contact Gillian with items for the weekly Mirrorball Museletter via mirrorballmuseltter@outlook.com’
Chik Duncan
Chik Duncan writes mainly for performance and values the freedom this affords from editorial and commercial constraints. Nonetheless he has recently been exploring the possibility of publication and has four pieces in the latest edition of Southlight Magazine, Southlight 16. He has also published a book of verse for children – A Load Of Young Nonsense – which is much influenced by his interest in the use of creative writing to teach Philosophy to the very young. Presently this is only available for Kindle but as he is disillusioned by Amazon’s business practices he is now trying to find more ethical yet effective ways of disseminating his work. Along with performances of his own work Chik’s interpretation of Tam o’ Shanter usually means he has at least one busy week in January. YouTube link, work on the web, webpage.
Gerrie Fellows’ latest publication is Shadow Box (Shearsman, 2023) a set of poems concerned with objects from Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum. She has published five full collections including Uncommon Place which explores our relationship to place through Scotland’s urban and mountain landscapes and The Body in Space, both from Shearsman. Window for a Small Blue Child, a sequence of poems about IVF, was shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. A New Zealander by birth, she has lived in Glasgow since the early eighties and was the mentor for Clydebuilt 1 and 7.
Cheryl Follon
Cheryl’s most recent collection Santiago, published by Bloodaxe Books, is made up of 85 short prose poems that delight in the thing itself. These are simple and communicative poems, looking at the world from new angles and in a surprising way and one that hopefully delights. Previous to this, she has published two collections, also with Bloodaxe Books. She teaches in a further education college in Glasgow and a good deal of her free time is spent travelling.
Graham Fulton’s seven full-length poetry collections are Humouring the Iron Bar Man (Polygon,1990), Knights of the Lower Floors (Polygon,1994), Open Plan (Smokestack Books, 2011), Full Scottish Breakfast (Red Squirrel Press, 2011), Reclaimed Land (The Grimsay Press, 2013), One Day in the Life of Jimmy Denisovich (Smokestack Books, 2013) and Photographing Ghosts (Roncadora Press, 2014). He’s also published over 15 pamphlets of poetry, many of which combine poetry, illustration and photography, and has recently been involved in the Palestinian poetry anthology A Bird is Not a Stone. He is also co-author of Pub Dogs of Glasgow (Freight Books, 2014). He won the Scotia Bar First of May Poetry Prize in 1992 and hasn’t entered a competition since. He runs Controlled Explosion Press.
Magi Gibson’s full length collections are Graffiti in Red Lipstick, Wild Women of a Certain Age, and Kicking Back. Poems appear in many anthologies including Modern Scottish Women Poets (Canongate), Scottish Love Poems (Canongate), The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry, (Edinburgh University Press), 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems (Luath), New Writing Scotland, Original Prints, (Polygon), Meantime, Prize Winning Writing (Polygon), Fresh Oceans (Stramullion), The Butterfly Rammy (Common Weal 2015). Magazines publishing her work include Chapman, The Stinging Fly, The Poet’s Republic, Cencrastus, Northwords, as well as The Scotsman and The Herald. Her poems have featured as an SAC Poem of the Month, SAC Christmas card 2004, Amnesty International/Big Issue postcard, and as three official National Poetry Day poetry postcards in Scotland. She’s held three Scottish Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowships, a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship, and was Stirling Makar. Her sequence, The Senile Dimension, won the Scotland on Sunday/Women 2000 Writing Prize, and in 2009 she received a major Scottish Arts Council bursary. Magi is a skilled creative writing tutor and mentor. Her experience includes teaching with Glasgow University, St Andrews University International Summer Schools, and many times at Moniack Mhor. A new poetry collection will be out in 2016.
Stephanie Green has an MPhil in C/W from Glasgow University (2004), and has won a New Writers Bursary (2007) and several bursaries from Creative Scotland. Her novel ‘The Triple Spiral’, was published by Walker Books, 1989. A poetry pamphlet, ‘Glass Works’ (Cat’s Pyjamas Publications, 2005) was shortlisted for the Callum McDonald Award. ‘Flout’, inspired by Shetland landscape, folklore and culture, was published by HappenStance, 2015. She has collaborated with many artists from differing media: dance, music and fine art. Most recently, ‘Berlin Umbrella’ an aural walk of recordings listened to within umbrellas was a poetry/sound collaboration with Sound Artist, Sonja Heyer, launched in Berlin, 2018 then appearing at StAnza in 2020. Currently (2022/3) she is collaborating with Sonja on another poetry/sound walk inspired by the Ring of Brodgar and Bird Reserve, Orkney. Since 2020 she co-curates PoetryLit, an online poetry event with Milla Van Der Have. She works part-time as a C/W tutor and also reviews Theatre and Dance. Irish/English, originally London-based, she moved, via Wales, to Edinburgh in 2000. website: www.stephaniegreen.org.uk
Irene Hossack
Irene Hossack was selected as a member of Clydebuilt 3, mentored by Liz Lochhead. She has had poems published internationally, most recently in Double Bill Anthology (Red Squirrel Press, 2014), Gutter, Long Poem Magazine and Causeway/Cabhsair. Her poems are included in North Light: The Anthology of Clydebuilt 3 (Dreadful Night Press, 2012). She was shortlisted for a New Writers Award, 2010/11. She holds a PhD from Monash University and is currently a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University.
Vicki Husband’s first collection of poems: This Far Back Everything Shimmers was published by Vagabond Voices and shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2016. More recently Sykkel Saga, a pamphlet length poem, was published by Mariscat Press in 2019. Vicki has enjoyed working on collaborations such as the Glasgow to Lahore project run by Highlight Arts (2015) which involved a reading at the Alchemy Festival, Southbank Centre, London and The Lahore Literature Festival, Pakistan (2016). Vicki co-runs a poetry book group in Glasgow with Mark Russell (anyone welcome).
Alexander Hutchison (1943-2015) was a poet and translator who wrote in English and Scots; he also enjoyed singing. Born and brought up in Buckie, Sandy lived his later years in Glasgow. In 2007 Salt, published his collection Scales Dog: New and Selected Poems. Hutchison was an RLF fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2010-2012) and also was the mentor for Clydebuilt 5. His last book, Bones & Breath (Salt, 2013) won the inaugural Saltire Best Poetry Book award in 2014. Two poems from that collection were highly commended and published in the Forward Anthology (2015).
Gordon Kennedy is a writer and electronic musician based in Glasgow, who releases music on London’s Fang Bomb label as one half of groovesome sound art duo The Cray Twins. He’s currently finishing off his first poetry collection, titled [ X ] – the first of three volumes in extended project The End of The Alphabet. His present focus is developing a live performance environment for this, using processed soundscape & video footage from the individual poems’ locations as context for the spoken word. This approach is an extension of his musical work, which involves making electronic instruments from field recordings of the landscape: the wind & the waves, traffic & machinery, birds’ wings & human voices. His poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Rialto, Paris Atlantic, The Herald and the Telegraph.
© Al Buntin
Eleanor Livingstone is a Scottish poet, reviewer and editor who lives in Fife. Eleanor was Artistic Director then Festival Director of StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, from 2005-2021 (www.stanzapoetry.org). Her first full collection, Even the Sea (Red Squirrel Press, 2010), now in a second edition, was shortlisted for the 2010 inaugural London New Poetry award for first collections. Her other publications include The Last King of Fife (HappenStance, 2005), A Sampler (HappenStance, 2008) and as editor Skein of Geese (The Shed Press, 2008) and Migraasje: Versions in Scots and Shetlandic (Stravaigers, 2008).
Skye Loneragan is an award-winning writer/performer and poet, recent Artistic Director of Toonspeak Young People’s Theatre & currently Writer-in-Residence at the Wigtown Book Festival 2016. She has toured, published and performed her poetry internationally, including supporting Kate Tempest for ‘Word Travels ‘Spoken Four’ at the Sydney Writers Festival, where she installed her public engagement strategy: Q-POETICS. Q-POETICS places the poet and poetry in places & spaces of waiting and she’s installed herself most recently in queues as part of the Cultural Programme for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. Passionate about Curiosity as Currency, both in terms of value and exchange, Skye has worked within various contexts as an artist-in-residence. Supported by a New Writers Award, and FST Unplugged Bursary, she has researched her writing for performance internationally. Edinburgh Fringe First & Sydney Poetry prize winner, Skye is featured poet with the Sydney Morning Herald online iPad app. Publications include contributions Buying Into The Property Market (GRIST Anthology UK, edited by Simon Armitage) and The Grin Of Our Choices, (Abridged Magazine, UK) and Award Winning Australian Writing (Melbourne Books, 2012). She is yet to publish a collection of works, though her Q-POETICS commission took the form of 10 filmed poetry films, accessible online and aired on radio, and printed Counter Number poetry tickets in which everyone is No.1 (ONE).
Rosie’s stories and poems are from her deep experience of living among animals and birds and of magic. She loves sharing traditional tales, her stories and poetry to audiences where families and friends share together. She hosts live literary events in Ayr and takes story walks round Ayrshire. She co-owns a boarding cattery, offering holistic and healing care for animals. She studied botany with David Bellamy, has been a Special Constable, Veterinary Nurse and once ran a heavy metal disco. She is part of the Living Voices project which shares story, song and poetry with elders and those with dementia. She is presently creating a heritage trail for Ayr. You may also find her wild dancing; foraging plants for gastronomic delectation or caring for her bees. Rosie’s poetry has been published by Glasgow Review of Books, Fairacre Press and in Lonely: collectionsofpoetryandprose.com; L0VE – A Collection of Poetry and Prose on Loving and Being in Love; also Word on the Streets magazine
Robyn Marsack has been living in Glasgow since 1987, when she was working as a freelance publishers’ editor, critic and translator. Since 2000 she has been Director of the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and thus has spent more time on Scotrail than she cares to add up. At least she can read poetry as she travels. She published 2 books in 2014: an edition of the war prose of Edmund Blunden, Fall In, Ghosts (Carcanet Press), and with Peter France she co-edited the anthology After Lermontov: translations for the bicentenary (also Carcanet Press).
Richie McCaffery
Richie McCaffery lives in Stirling and teaches and studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is completing a PhD in the Scottish Literature department on the Scottish poets of World War Two. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Spinning Plates (2012) and Ballast Flint (2013) as well as the collection Cairn (2014).
Ian MacDonald is from North Uist in the Western Isles and has worked in a wide variety of jobs in Birmingham, Uist, Glasgow and London. He worked for Comhairle nan Leabhraichean (the Gaelic Books Council) in Glasgow until the end of 2010, and continues to edit books and assist authors and publishers. He has had poems and short stories published and has edited or translated many books in Gaelic and English, among them Am Mabinogi, the first Gaelic version of the famous Welsh stories. With Boyd Robertson, he compiled the Essential Gaelic Dictionary in the ‘Teach Yourself’ series, which appeared in 2004 and has regularly been reprinted, and his Gaelic translation of a shortened version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth has been seen at the Tron and Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival.
Ellen McAteer is the Director of the Poetry Trust, which runs the Aldeburgh Poetry festival, the Poetry Prom, the Aldeburgh 8 poet’s development scheme and the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. She is the founder of tell it slant, Glasgow’s specialist poetry bookshop, and a tutor on the Masters of Research (Creative Practices) at the Glasgow School of Art. She was previously a director of the Scottish Writers’ Centre. She is a mentee of the St Mungo’s Mirrorball Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship Scheme, under Alexander Hutchison, and a singer with the band Stone Tape. She has had work translated into Dutch, and took part in a project to translate Palestinian poetry into English, Scots dialects and Gaelic, alongside poets such as Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray, and John Glenday. She has been published in the resulting anthology “A Bird is Not a Stone”, as well as the anthology “Tip Tap Flat”, and in Gutter, New Writing Scotland and Aesthetica Magazine, among others. Her pamphlet, Honesty Mirror, won the New Writer Pamphlet Prize for 2013, judged by Helen Mort.
Saskia McCracken is a Glasgow based writer and Editor at Osmosis Press. She is a member of 12 collective and the Victoria Writers’ Circle. Her publications include Imperative Utopia (-algia press), Cyanotypes(Dancing Girl Press), The King of Birds (Hickathrift Press) and Zero Hours (Broken Sleep Books 2022). She won the Floresta poetry prize, was longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction prize, and was shortlisted for the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize and Future Places Environmental Essay Prize. Her work appears in publications including Magma, Datableed, Amberflora, and Zarf, and has been anthologised by Dostoyevsky Wannabe and Spam Press. @SaskiadeRM saskiamccracken.wordpress.com
Marion McCready lives in Dunoon, Argyll. Her poems have been published widely including in Poetry, Edinburgh Review and the Glasgow Herald. She has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections from Eyewear Publishing. Her third collection, Look to the Crocus, is due to be published Spring 2023. In her life outside of writing, she is a counsellor and psychotherapist working in private practice.
James McGonigal is a poet, editor and translator, born in Dumfries but resident in Glasgow for many years. His Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan (Sandstone Press, 2010, 2012) was the Saltire Scottish Research Book of the Year, and he recently co-edited a Carcanet selection of Morgan’s correspondence 1950–2010, called The Midnight Letterbox. His Passage/An Pasaíste (Mariscat Press, 2004) won the Deric Bolton Long Poem Award, and Cloud Pibroch (Mariscat Press, 2010) won the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Award. The Camphill Wren (Red Squirrel Press, 2016) is his first full collection. Poems can be found at jamesmcgonigal.com together with other publications.
Carol McKay’s poems have appeared in /Gutter, Istanbul Review, From
Glasgow to Saturn /and other magazines. They’ve featured in mixed-media
exhibitions including artist Moira Buchanan’s ‘All Washed Up’ at Harbour
Arts Centre, Irvine, and the 26 Atlantic Crossings exhibition in Prince
Edward County, Ontario, where her work was paired with Andrea Pillar’s
ceramics. Her poem ‘Indigo’ featured in a poetry pamphlet celebrating
Govanhill Bath’s ‘The Steamie’. Carol won the Robert Louis Stevenson
Fellowship in 2010 for her fiction. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing
from The Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow, and teaches creative
writing through The Open University. Her website is www.carolmckay.co.uk
Ciara MacLaverty was born in Belfast, grew up on Islay and lives in Glasgow. She is a current recipient of a 2017 New Writer’s Award form the Scottish Book Trust. Her poems have appeared in The Scotsman, New Writing Scotland and Gutter. She is currently a mentee in Clydebuilt 2015-16. She blogs about motherhood and writing here.
Mairghread McLundie
Mairghread McLundie has a background in computing science and design/craft, and in 2006 completed a Ph.D. examining aspects of creative processes. She is fascinated by objects, particularly in nature, and poetry allows her to combine that with her love of words. The visual element of poetry is important to her: how a poem inhabits the page, as well as how it sounds. She has had poems published in Gliberagora, New Writing Scotland, and Miscellaneous: Writing inspired by The Hunterian.
Moira McPartlin made a big impact with The Incomers, her debut novel set in Fife. It was shortlisted for the Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award and was a critical success. Her speculative fiction Sun Song Trilogy novels, Ways of the Doomed, Wants of the Silent and Star of Hope set in 2089, reflect many issues we are living with today. In September 2019 her short play A Handful Of Glaur was included as part of the UNESCO Cities of Literature Short Play Festival in New Zealand and in 2020 she was awarded a writing fellowship at Hawthronden Castle (deferred to 2021). She is also a prolific writer of short stories and poetry and has been published in a variety of literary magazines. Her new novel Before Now: Memoir of a Toerag was published in May 2021. She lives in Stirling.
Anne B. Murray
Anne B. Murray is a Glaswegian now living in Stirling. Formerly a creative writing group facilitator, she has recently retired to spend more time on her own writing. She has had many poems published in several journals and anthologies. She has published four poetry pamphlets, the most recent The Colour Shop (2019). A passionate believer that poetry is meant to be spoken and heard, she organises public poetry readings and spoken word events and has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, Glasgow’s Aye Write and Stirling’s Off the Page Festivals.
Alexandra Oliver
Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, Canada. She holds an M.A. in Drama/Cinema Studies from The University of Toronto and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The University of Southern Maine. Her most recent poetry collection, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (Biblioasis, 2013) was the recipient of the 2014 Pat Lowther Award and was named a Canadian Poetry Book of the Year by The National Post. A co-editor of the Canadian formalist review The Rotary Dial, Oliver is also co-editing (with Annie Finch) Measure for Measure, an anthology of metrical poetry forthcoming from Everyman/Random House.
Derek Parkes
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After moving to Glasgow Derek Parkes attended Donny O’Rourke’s Creative Writing class at Glasgow University and was initially disappointed to discover that the class had a ‘poetry bias’, but four years later he seems to write nothing but poetry. Derek has been ‘highly recommended’ in the Stirling ‘Off The Stanza’ competition, and reads regularly at ‘Tell it Slant’, ‘The Last Monday at Rio’, ‘Poetry at The Ivory’ and ‘The Magic Carpet Cabaret’ at the Tchai Ovna tea room, where he also had the honour of ‘headlining’. Derek assists with organising events at ‘Poetry at the Ivory’, and has been the Admin Officer for The Scottish Writers’ Centre. Derek features regularly in the Renfrew RSPB newsletter, indulging his other passion: birdwatching.
Tracy Patrick lives in Paisley. Her poems and prose have been published in anthologies and magazines, including New Writing Scotland, Southlight, The Eildon Tree, Gutter, PENning andAcumen, and on the Glasgow Underground. Tracy was editor of Earth Love poetry magazine from 2001-2013, raising around £3500.00 for conservation causes. Her novel, Blushing is for Sinners, was commended by the Saltire First Book of the Year judges, 2019. Tracy is a former Clydebuilt 6 mentee, and has one poetry pamphlet, Wild Eye Fire Eye, and one full length collection, Portrait.
Nalini Paul’s first poetry pamphlet, Skirlags, was shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Award in 2010. Since working as George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow in Orkney (2009–10), her poetry has moved increasingly towards wild landscapes. Through collaborative projects with visual artists, dancers and musicians, she continues to push the boundaries of her writing. Stage credits include Ankur Productions’ Ha-Ha (2012) and Jukebox (2013). A screen-printed booklet of her poem, “Hrafn Floki”, based on the Shetland folk story, is held by The National Gallery of Modern Art’s, Special Books Collection. Nalini teaches Creative Writing in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Eveline Pye was in Clydebuilt 3, mentored by Liz Lochhead. Her main themes are Zambia, mathematics and family. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines, newspapers, anthologies and statistical journals. A collection of Zambian poems will be published by Mariscat in 2015. Her mathematical poems were featured in the Royal Statistical Society’s magazine, Significance, and she was an invited poet at the Bridges International Conference in the Netherlands, 2013. She is membership secretary for Mirrorball and poetry editor for New Voices Press.
Kay Ritchie
Mark Russell won the 2022 erbacce-prize, and the 2020 Magma Poetry Judge’s Prize. His full collections are Men Who Repeat Themselves (erbacce), Spearmint & Rescue (Pindrop), and Shopping for Punks (Hesterglock). Beir Bua Press will publish Come to the River in early 2023. His poems have been published in a variety of magazines, including Stand, Shearsman, The Manchester Review, The Rialto, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter’s House, Molly Bloom, Tentacular, Gutter, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Blackbox Manifold. He was a Clydebuilt Apprentice under Alexander Hutchison, and co-hosts the Glasgow Poetry Book Group with Vicki Husband.
Kathrine Sowerby
Rachel Tennant is a landscape architect and photographer with an award winning design practice based in the UK and Hong Kong. Unashamedly a landscape poet with a strong grounding in a sense of place her writing aims to distil a physical and emotional response to a location that captures and renders the ‘spirit of a place’. Rachel’s work has been included in the Glasgow Anthology ‘Tip Tap Flat’, Prole Magazine 2013, Glasgow to Saturn, Glasgow University, Dame Evelyn Glennie’s website, Land of Pometos, Glasgow Review of Books and Glasgow Women Poets collection.
Mary Thomson has published five pamphlet collections, two of which, Some Consequences of Saying Yes (2012) and East End (2013) were short listed for the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for pamphlet poetry. For many years she worked in the arts in Yorkshire but has lived in Scotland for 9 years and in Glasgow for the last two. Her poems have appeared in Gutter magazine and as poems of the day in The Herald newspaper.
Neil Thomson
Neil Thomson started writing poetry regularly after completing university, where he studied engineering and physics. Family, living in Glasgow and working in the computer networking field in various industries have been the main focus, with poetry providing the means to capture snapshots and glimpses of various moments over the years. Since the Netscape era of the web, Neil has spent time creating poems and images on various social media platforms
Samuel Tongue was a member of Clydebuilt 3 on the SS North Light. He has had poems published in many journals and magazines, including Anon, From Glasgow to Saturn, Gutter, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The List, Magma, Northwords Now, The Red Wheelbarrow and Succour. ‘The Laws of the Game’ was the title piece for the Commonwealth Games 2014 poetry anthology. Samuel was the recipient of a Callan Gordon Award as part of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards in 2013. He is the ‘Beyond Clydebuilt’ development officer and poetry editor at the Glasgow Review of Books (www.glasgowreviewofbooks.com). He also co-organises Poetry@The Ivory. Tweets at @SamuelTongue @GlasgowRevBooks @PoetryAtIvory
Barbara Tropp lives in Glasgow and is happily retired. In 2008, after having had to exit abruptly from a seven year marriage, she began to write a memoir about this period in her life. The creative process was revealed to her, which led a few years later to writing poetry; an unexpected joy in her life.
David Underdown lives on the Isle of Arran. He is an organiser of the McLellan Poetry Competition. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals and his first collection ‘Time Lines’ was published by Cinnamon in 2011. A second, ‘A Sense of North’, is currently awaiting publication, also by Cinnamon.
Lynnda Wardle grew up in Johannesburg and has lived in Glasgow since 1999. In 2007 she received a Scottish Arts Council new writer’s grant to work on a novella about Africa. She has had poems and stories published in various magazines, including Outercast, thi wurd and Gutter.
Stephen Watt is Dumbarton FC’s Poet in Residence and was Makar for the Federation of Writers (Scotland) in 2019. As well as four poetry collections which includes the world’s first crime book entirely in verse, Stephen has edited a collection on behalf of the Joe Strummer Foundation, and is one-half of gothic music/spoken word project Neon a poltergeist. @Stephenwattspit
Brian Whittingham (1950-2022)
Brian Whittingham was born and lived in Glasgow and taught Creative Writing at The City of Glasgow College. Brian had five poetry collections published, the most recent being CLOCKING IN CLOCKING OUT (Poems & photographs about people who work), also SEPTIMUS PITT, BUNNETS N BOWLERS, DRINK THE GREEN FAIRY all by LUATH PRESS & THE OLD MAN FROM BROOKLYN by MARISCAT PRESS. Brian had fellowships in New York, Seattle and Grez in France. Brian was a Poet, fiction writer, drama writer and editor.
St Mungo's Mirrorball 