Catrin Mari
Catrin Mari Instagram Coffee Catrin Mari is an autistic social scientist with a background in the heritage sector, based in Cardiff. She uses poetry to break barriers to engaging with academic research. Her poetry deals with themes of sense of place, uncovering stories of under-appreciated historic figures, and shifting identities including as a Welsh and neurodivergent person. Her work is due to be published in an anthology of Welsh radical poetry, an online zine about the valleys, a collection raising money for mental health charity, Mind; and Disabled Tales, a literary magazine exploring disabled fairytale figures. She regularly performs her poetry in Cardiff and online. Your browser does not support the audio element. Your browser does not support the audio element. Read More… Afonydd Lleisiau hanner cant o feirdd yn llifo gydag afonydd Cymru. Pob cerdd yn Gymraeg a Saesneg, wedi’i chyfieithu o’r naill iaith i’r llall. Fifty Welsh poets speak for and with the rivers of Wales. Every poem translated Welsh to English, English to Welsh. Disabled Tales This online journal aims to spotlight both well-known and lesser-known characters and explore what a disabled perspective can bring to our understanding of these stories, so why not dive right in and read some of the excellent contributions they’ve already published! These Pages Sing: Autumn 2024 Published in 2024 Autumn 2024 Issue of These Pages Sing Literary Magazine: a curated collection of poetry and short fiction from writers with a Welsh connection. Autumn 2024 Wordsmiths: Sue Moules, Gareth Writer-Davies, Carolyn Thomas, George Sandifer-Smith, Sheila Jacob, Catrin Mari, Sue Regan, Angela Graham, Elizabeth Lockwood, Angela Arnold, Charly White, M.R.Smith, Barbara Hughes-Moore, Guinevere Clark, Catrin Lawrence, Rebecca Elizabeth Roberts, Rosy Adams, Jonah Jones. Cover Illustrated by Kornelia Urbaniak. Read Afonydd Explore Disabled Tales Read TPS
Sheila Jacob
Sheila Jacob Sheila Jacob lives in N.E.Wales with her husband. She has lived in Wales for fifty years but was born and raised in Birmingham and finds her Brummie heritage a rich source of inspiration. Her poems have appeared in various magazines and e-zines including The High Window, Atrium, Black Nore Review, and her debut pamphlet with Yaffle Press, Spotlit Under Street Lamps, has recently been published. Your browser does not support the audio element. Your browser does not support the audio element. Read More… Spotlit Under Street Lamps ‘Your mum’s dabbing her eyes. Mum who never weeps turns a working holiday into the year’s highlight. You’re nineteen tomorrow and suddenly, bab, you’re afraid’ (Closing verse of ‘Somerset summers’ set in September 1939) These Pages Sing: Autumn 2024 Published in 2024 Autumn 2024 Issue of These Pages Sing Literary Magazine: a curated collection of poetry and short fiction from writers with a Welsh connection. Autumn 2024 Wordsmiths: Sue Moules, Gareth Writer-Davies, Carolyn Thomas, George Sandifer-Smith, Sheila Jacob, Catrin Mari, Sue Regan, Angela Graham, Elizabeth Lockwood, Angela Arnold, Charly White, M.R.Smith, Barbara Hughes-Moore, Guinevere Clark, Catrin Lawrence, Rebecca Elizabeth Roberts, Rosy Adams, Jonah Jones. Cover Illustrated by Kornelia Urbaniak. Read Spotlit Under Street Lamps Read TPS
George Sandifer-Smith
George Sandifer-Smith George Sandifer-Smith is a Welsh poet, originally from Pembrokeshire. He has published two books of poetry, Empty Trains (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Nights Travel at the Right Speed (Infinity Books UK, 2022). He is currently the Reviews Editor at Poetry Wales Magazine, a position he has held since 2022. He has previously edited the poetry anthology The Wait in aid of Cancer Research, and also was guest poetry editor for the inaugural issue of Abergavenny Small Press Journal. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Wales, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Stockholm Review, New Welsh Review, Atrium, and numerous anthologies including Poems from Pembrokeshire (Seren Books, 2019), Hit Points – an Anthology of Video Game Poetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Anne-thology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare (Broken Sleep Books, 2023). In 2019, he was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing by Aberystwyth University. As well as writing poetry, he has also published fiction with Gwyllion Magazine and Inventive Podcast (Overtone Productions, 2021). His first children’s book, Cholloo’s Birthday, a collaboration with artist Julia Ashby Smyth, was published by Lily in 2014. He lives with his wife, and their rescue cat Deli. Your browser does not support the audio element. Your browser does not support the audio element. Your browser does not support the audio element. Empty Trains Empty Trains looks at the notion of spaces altering to accommodate changes introduced during the pandemic. While avoiding the pitfalls of Covid poetry, Sandifer-Smith deftly traces the poetics of space into a contemporary setting. Empty Trains does more than offer a frame through which to view such spaces: it challenges us to look at the spaces in which we live, work, and think with fresh eyes. The Wait From the fall of Troy to the Martian sands, and from microwaves to mammograms, The Wait is a collection of one hundred poems covering a swelling gyre of human, and sometimes less human, experiences, from previously unpublished poets to established veterans of the literary world. The profits from the sales of this independently published volume will go entirely to Cancer Research. These Pages Sing: Autumn 2024 Published in 2024 Autumn 2024 Issue of These Pages Sing Literary Magazine: a curated collection of poetry and short fiction from writers with a Welsh connection. Autumn 2024 Wordsmiths: Sue Moules, Gareth Writer-Davies, Carolyn Thomas, George Sandifer-Smith, Sheila Jacob, Catrin Mari, Sue Regan, Angela Graham, Elizabeth Lockwood, Angela Arnold, Charly White, M.R.Smith, Barbara Hughes-Moore, Guinevere Clark, Catrin Lawrence, Rebecca Elizabeth Roberts, Rosy Adams, Jonah Jones. Cover Illustrated by Kornelia Urbaniak. Read Empty Trains Read The Wait Read TPS Nights Travel at the Right Speed Landscape and nature take centre stage in this practised collection. Here we have a bird’s – or perhaps moth’s – eye view of the natural world and the ways in which we interact (and often fail to interact) with it. The Moth Box also interrogates our various environments: ecological, linguistic, national – even astrological and philosophical. Camouflage, too, plays a role; certainly with creatures such as the eponymous moth, but also the disguises in which we cloak ourselves. This is a collection teeming with life, but for all the cats, moths, birds, trees, The Moth Box never forgets what it is to be human. Gwyllion, Issue #4 Gwyllion can be many things. The ghosts and spirits that haunt the halls at twilight, the dusk wanderers up to no good. The scoundrels and the miscreants. The wise old fae who take no nonsense from humans. Hags and witches, wisps and sprites, the gwyllion are every malevolent trickster that wanders the night in search of mischief. Eight Arch Blues Composed in a series of correspondences between George Sandifer-Smith and John C Lloyd during late 2020, this chapbook is an oil of memory and dream afloat an ocean of pandemic. From poems on abstraction and morality to solid pieces rooted in the poets’ childhood home of Pembrokeshire, this short collection seeks evocation in the physical, and to tell stories where people and imagination meet. Read Nights Travel at the Right Speed Read Gwyllion, Issue #4 Read Eight Arch Blues
Carolyn Thomas
Carolyn Thomas Carolyn Thomas is from Tonna, a village in the Neath Valley in South Wales, but has lived on Tyneside since her days as a student at Newcastle University. Now retired after a career of teaching in Further, Higher and Adult Education, she is now enjoying the freedom to write. She has reviewed for Stand and published poetry in Dreich, Impossible Archetype, The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere as well as stories in two anthologies published by Honno Press, Lipstick Eyebrows and Painting the Beauty Queens Orange, which contains her account of life as a gay woman in the 1970s. She lives with a misanthropic cat, still thinks of Wales as home and, stereotypically, sports a dragon tattoo. Lipstick Eyebrows Chosen for their contemporary edge in both setting and story, this collection reflects the lives of contemporary women of mixed age and background. The collection hosts an all-female cast covering themes of travel, arrival, change, reconciliation, departures, estrangement, death, survival and the intricacies of women’s lives. Stories included: Kate Waddon: Wild Romances, Carolyn Thomas: The King of the Fairies, Gosia Buzzanca: Summer’s End, Silvia Rose: By the Water’s Edge, Naomi Paulus: Lipstick Eyebrows, Julie Primon: Something about weddings, Tracey Rhys: Pearls Before Swine, Chinyere Chukwude-Okeh: To buy an expensive dream, Ellen Davies: Scab Painting the Beauty Queens Orange The ‘70s wasn’t all glam rock and flares, punk and pogo-ing… In Painting the Beauty Queens Orange, the women who lived the decade reveal what it meant to push boundaries, claim your identity, and carve out your place amidst the winter of discontent, the scorching summer of ‘76 and the rise of Thatcherism. One young woman says a forced goodbye to her newborn baby. Another grasps new opportunities and sets sail on a LGP Tanker with a crew of men. A third asserts her sexual identity. A fourth sets up a kitchen table business that launches an international brand. These stories of ambition and adventure, motherhood and marriage, are by turns heart-breaking, humorous, and honest.
Gareth Writer-Davies
Gareth Writer-Davies Gareth Writer-Davies is from Pencelli, Wales. His work has been recognized multiple times in various competitions, including being shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2014 and 2017. He was also commended in the Prole Laureate Competition in 2015 and 2021, and was named the Prole Laureate for 2017. Gareth received commendations in the Welsh Poetry Competition in 2015 and was highly commended in 2017. In 2023, he won the Wirral Festival Poetry Competition and was the runner-up in the Spelt Poetry Competition. In 2024, he was the runner-up in the Mid Wales Poetry Prize. Gareth was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2019. His published works include Bodies (2015) and Cry Baby (2017) by Indigo Dreams. He has also published The Lover’s Pinch (2018), The End (2019), and Wysg (2022) by Arenig Press. Wysg In WYSG Gareth Writer-Davies is instantly recognisable, as he navigates the borderlands of Wales, seeking to bridge the new and the familiar; the streaming of our lives, our conflicts with nature, getting older and always, where we have been and where we are going? The End Poems from the edge of annihilation, leavened with black humour and pastiche, musings upon poetry and posterity even as death beckons. The Lover’s Pinch Gareth Writer-Davies fleshes out his twin subjects of love and sex in poems of affection, sardonic humour and a characteristic lightness of touch that makes his first collection both exceptionally readable and an intimate pleasure.
Sue Moules
Sue Moules has been published in New Welsh Review, Planet, Poetry Wales, and Ambit. Her Poems were included in the International Women’s Day anthology (Welsh Women’s Coalition, 2010).
In 2024, her poem ‘Walking the Whippet’ was chosen for Brighton and Hove Poems on the Buses.
Her poems have appeared in By Ways Anthology (Arachne) 2024 and Words on Troubled Waters (Lutra Press) 2024. Her most recent collection is The Moth Box (Parthian).