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Press Release: Five New Poets in Residence at the 3rd London Poetry Festival 2007

April 30, 2006: 3rd London Poetry Festival 2007 has given five young and emerging poets Poets in Residency  positions who would form the signature presentation of the Festival.

These poets are: 

Briony Dennis (Hampshire)

Inua Ellams (Nunhead, London)

Juli Jeana (Southbank, London)

Tom Chivers (East London) 

Tricia Peak (Dover)

Please contact us should you require any photos of these poets or their contact details. Please write to: contact at londonpoetryfestival dot com or call on 07809 682 065. To know more about these poets or read their work visit their webpages at this website by clicking on their names.

The Residency started in February and will last till January 2008 after which these positions would be offered to five new poets at the 4th Festival.

Briony Dennis comes from Hampshire, England, and is interested in exploring mythology, science and different personas through her poetry.

 She recently completed a Masters Degree in Critical and Creative Writing at Winchester University and one day hopes to have earned enough to be able to afford to do a PhD with a thesis on the relationship between science and poetry. 

Briony has been published in Poet's Letter and through her enthusiasm and commitment to poetry she became part of the Poet's Letter Team being the Literature Editor of the Magazine.

Inua Ellams is a writer with a style as influenced by Shakespeare and Keats as it is by MosDef and Talib Kweli. His first love was graphic art; the first time he toyed with a pen, he immediately fell in love with the magic line that grew from the point that touched the paper.
He started writing in late 2002, the following year, he caught a glimpse of a poet performing on HBO's "Real Sex" series and decided there and then to get up and start performing. He says it wasn't the naked lady dancing erotically in a bath tub behind her that spurred him on; He swears this to be true.

A web-search of "Poetry" led him to his first ever open-mic performance, where after a short display of word art, two months later was invited for his first feature show. To date He has performed at a long list of venues including: the Route 343 Bus, the National Tate Gallery, at The Albany Theatre in Deptford, Deal Real Records, The Drum (Birmingham), The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, The Tobacco Factory Bristol, The Glastonbury Music and Latitude Festival, and at distinguished street corners across the world.

Concerning liquids, He believes in aPple jUice, likes his coffee absent and claims to conjure Krystal out of rain puddles. Concerning solids, He believes in green apples, likes his steak well done, and claims to have a desk carved of brimstone and beautiful. Concerning life, he believes it is the greatest symphony of all, that people all freestyle and adlib to it, but once in a while, we have to conform to the beat. Within the symphony are significant riffs like Ghandi or King- they give kudos to the great concert.

Juli Jeana was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and has lived in many places in South Africa, England and the United States. After studying at the University of South Africa she opted to live in a small village where she learned to milk cows and plant vegetables. In the quiet of the countryside she wrote poetry, painted, held exhibitions and also raised a family. Always open to new experiences she and her husband spent three years on a mission in the Transkei after which they became apple farmers.

Being a many talented person she decided to become a musician in midlife, joined a band and travelled for the next ten years. She now has a house next to the sea in Cape Town but works and lives in London.

Her poetry reflects her various approaches and experiences of life. She works as a visual poet with words in abstract cubistic images and paints finely cut words in primary and secondary colours.

She is a London based poet who also exhibits her art work in London and surrounds. She co-presents More Poetry monthly in Borough, London Bridge. She has been writing poetry for a number of years and has been published in various magazines here and abroad.
Presently she teaches Art and English in an inner London city school.

Juli Jaena is a London based artist/poet. Exhibitions during August 2006 Rhythm Factory opening 27 Nov 2006 - paintings in Abstract (solo) Carey Faye Group Exhibition of Graphics - Kentish Town Bun Gallery, Cape Town (solo) Also exhibited at Sobo Gallery, Tower Bridge 2006
Between 2004 -2006 exhibited at Art House, Brighton (group) Synergy, Brighton (solo) Terra a terra, Brighton (solo) Brighton Fair (group) St. Brides, London ( group) Morley College (group) Bermondsey Artists (group) Has held a number of solo and group exhibitions. Has been a professional musician Is presently enrolled at Metropolitan university for MFA

Tom Chivers is an energetic writer, editor and promoter of poetry. Born in 1983 and raised in South London, Tom was educated at Oxford University and now runs penned in the margins, the UK's most exciting live literature producer. He presents a weekly show devoted to poetry and spoken word on London's avant-garde arts radio station Resonance FM. He is Associate Editor of international literary journal Tears in the Fence and writes a regular column 'From the Other Side of the Fence'.

Tom's creative work is published widely in magazines including Fire, Stride, Smoke, Nthposition, The Reader, The Libertine, Isis, X-Magazine and The Wolf. His poems are included in the anthologies automatic-lighthouse (Tall Lighthouse, 2006) and Babylon Burning: 9/11 Five Years On (Nthposition, 2006) and have been translated into Serbian. His poem 'Eavesdropping' won Merit at the Nottingham International Poetry Competition 2002.

Tom lives and works in the East End of London, from where he draws inspiration for his poetry. His most recent work is concerned with negotiating new relationships with a fluctuating, unstable city that is continually coming to terms with its multiple and conflicting identities. Reflecting this, his poems are often multivocal and modulate between lyrical, conversational and descriptive registers. Patricia Prime writes in NHI Review, 'Tom Chivers has a striking, individual voice and a powerful one'. Tom is very much a poet of the urban landscape, but writes compelling of other places. His work also explores his own family history, confronting feelings of love, loss and alienation.

Tom works towards a poetry that is instinctively musical, taking his cue from the likes of TS Eliot, Basil Bunting, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney and Barry MacSweeney, as well as contemporary writers such as Alice Oswald and Kamau Brathwaite. As a regular performer of his work, Tom writes for the ear and aims to harness the sound - as well as the sense - of words in his writing.

Tom's debut collection of poetry - provisionally titled London Pride, Mother's Ruin - is forthcoming from Waterways Publishing in 2007.

Tricia Peak has been writing poems since she was 10, many published and prizes won at a young age. Over the years, she has written hundreds. Has lived in Australia, the USA and UK as well as on a sailing yacht. Belonged to the Key West Poetry Guild for several years and discovered the joys of read-aloud verse and of sharing my previously-very-private poetic world. 

Aged 58 going on 10, she claims to be a "compulsive poet." Poetry is as natural to her as breathing or walking.

Educationally, she went to Penrith High School, a parochial coeducational state school, followed by Sydney University and an arts degree with a major in English. Unfortunately tertiary level creative writing wasn't an option in those days, regretted Tricia.

Press Release: 2nd London Poetry Festival 2006 at London's RADA

June 21, 2006: Poet's Letter would love to see poetry grow on the solid support of people who are individuals choosing to practise, support, nurture and celebrate poetry as a personal choice and therefore it is hoped that people stop looking at other people and bodies to come and support and "rescue" poetry.

One cannot see the astounding dawn where the sun spells out the spectrum of endless joys, thrill and hopes in the astonishing brilliance, all absorbing melody and soul flooding music if they fail to choose to open their eyes, to choose to get up and walk, choose to open the doors and walk right onto the spectacle.

Poet's Letter would like people to choose poetry and it will grow like an eternal tree offering humanity greenery and wind dance that will elaborate its oxygenated spirit and bring people in touch with the thrill and wonders of weather and music of life in the glorious cycle of seasons and take them beyond the bread-bridge and launch them into a space and reality that allows them to be something which is bigger than anything else that humanity could be: being human and being alive for which this system has yet to coin up a currency.

Here Poet's Letter is with poetry: shared areal space of our common humanity. Poet's Letter Second London Poetry Festival 2006 welcomes everyone to come and join in the celebration of contemporary English poetry.

Five Poets in Residence @ London Poetry Festival 2006, who are: Alan Buckley (Oxford), Girija Emma Jane Shettar (Isleworth, Middlesex) Luke Wright, (Essex, works in the Eastend of London) Malgorzata Kitowski (Brixham, Devon, now lives in London) and Philip Ruthen (Sutton, Surrey).

For tickets, volunteering, taking part or further information contact us.

or call 07935 791 607