How to Be a Poet

Jo Bell was born in Sheffield and grew up on the fringes of the Derbyshire Peak District, leaving school just after the Miners’ Strike. She became an industrial archaeologist, specialising in coal and lead mines. A winner of the Charles Causley Prize and the Manchester Cathedral Prize, she was the first Canal Laureate for the UK appointed by the Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust. She lives on a narrowboat on the English waterways. Kith (Nine Arches Press) is Jo Bell’s second collection of poems. Jane Commane is a poet, editor and publisher. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, for a decade she also worked in museums and archives and in 2016 she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development programme Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, and is co-author, with Jo Bell, of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook (Nine Arches Press).In 2017, she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. In 2019, Jane was commissioned by Historic England and the Poetry Society as part of the Where Light Falls project to write a poem alongside community groups which was projected onto the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and viewed by over 15,000 people over three nights as part of a music, poetry and light installation.

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