Miles Salter lives in York with his family, a lazy Greyhound, two guitars and a list of books he wants to read. His creative output since 2002 has included writing, making music, reviewing for York Press, running York Literature Festival for 8 years, presenting The Arts Show on Jorvik Radio and fronting local band Miles and The Chain Gang. He has written a novel for teenagers and an adventure story for children. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. His third collection of poetry, Fix, was published by Winter and May in 2020 after a seven-year gestation period, and features surreal and incisive prose poems that dwell on catastrophe, reinvention and why there are so few songs about cheese. He likes early Bruce Springsteen albums, Philip Larkin and Frasier. He thinks Marmite Peanut Butter is evil.

Natalie Rees lives in West Yorkshire, where she runs a private practice as a Play & Creative Arts Therapist.

She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester, and has been published and won prizes in the PENfro Poetry Competition, Flambard Press Poetry Prize, Poets & Players Poetry Competition, Leeds Health & Homes, The Interpreter’s House, Prole, and Ink, Sweat & Tears.

Natalie was born and raised in Clonmel, Ireland, by a German mother and an Irish father,who were both pastors of a Pentecostal Christian church.

Natalie recently published her debut pamphlet Low Tide with Calder Valley Poetry.

Filled with unforgettable lines, a wry humour and keen and exact observations, these poems range far and wide in their explorations of female desire and sexuality. In her examination of an unusual childhood, Rees refuses to look away from the difficult truth of how darkness and love can coexist. Kim Moore

In this impressive debut, startling images and dream-like narratives drift across the page, never quite settling. Natalie Rees has an original voice and an unflinching gaze. Themes embracing relationships, childhood trauma, and recovery are navigated with skill, elegance, and wit. There’s potency in what’s left unsaid, in the hesitancy of a line-break, the held breath of white space. Ian Humphreys

The poems in Low Tide pick their way through a minefield of ideals and ideas about the body, gender, family and faith; addressing themselves to lovers, a husband, preachers, the language of the Bible, the German language of a mother, the dead, the emergency services and, in one of its most brilliant poems, Laura Ingalls. Low Tide faces up to the world. It is powerful work, a poetry of becoming. John McAuliffe

Gaia Holmes lives in Halifax. She is a free-lance writer and creative writing tutor who works with schools, universities, libraries and other community groups throughout the West Yorkshire region. She runs ‘Igniting The Spark’, a weekly writing workshop usually at Dean Clough, Halifax (but, to the pandemic, is currently online) and is the co-host of ‘MUSE-LI’, an online writing group. She has had three full length poetry collections published by Comma Press: Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006) Lifting The Piano With One Hand (2013).Where The Road Runs Out (2018) and Tales from the Tachograph, a collaborative work with Winston Plowes (Calder Valley Poetry, 2017).She is currently working on a collection of short stories..

Her latest collection Where the Road Runs Out, transports us to the edge of things: to remote, treeless islands, to dark, unfathomable mines, to the gaping maw of grief. With frailty and ferocity, these poems map out the strange absences left in our lives when a rupture occurs like the sudden appearance of a sinkhole threatening to pull everything else down with it. Where the Road Runs Out is a moving, and often witty, portrait of loss, isolation, and ultimately healing. Above all, it is a paean to the landscape, and the myths, magic and mysteries that lie just beneath the surface.

Her poem Claustrophobia was highly commended in the 'best individual poem' category of the Forward Poetry Prize, 2007 and A homesick truckie In The Algarve was the featured poem in Frieda Hughes' weekly literary column in 'The Times' (May 2007). Several of her poems are included in teaching packs for the British council and 15 of her poems have been adapted to film. Kate Jessop's film adaptation of my poem Desires was short listed for a Virgin media award and screened at independent film festivals throughout the world.

In 2016 she won 1st prize in the Bare Fiction poetry competition.

In 2017 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship which enabled her to spend a whole, uninterrupted month writing in a 17th century castle in Midlothian, Scotland