L’Envoi is here.

Jan Dean (born 1950)

Jan runs workshops in schools, libraries and even cathedrals, encouraging people to write. She has published children’s fiction and poetry collections, including the CLiPPA shortlisted Wallpapering the Cat. She says, ‘Writing poems is wonderfully strange – like playing lucky dip with a barrelful of tigers, raspberry jellies and machine parts.’ Miss Aylward’s Journey is here.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Emily was from an upper-crust Massachusetts family and was apparently a sociable girl until something – scholars are divided about whether this might have been an unrequited love affair, or mental health struggles – led her to withdraw from the world. She retreated into the house, dressed all in white, and wrote almost 2,000 passionate poems which were discovered after her death. Some were neatly bound in little books, while others were scribbled on envelopes and the recipes she loved to cook. Only a handful were published before Emily’s death, and early editions ‘corrected’ her unusual punctuation. It wasn’t until 1955 that they appeared in print as she had written them, but she is now acknowledged to be one of history’s most important and best-loved poets.

Not knowing when the Dawn will come / Exultation is the Going are here and here.

Maura Dooley (born 1957)

Maura is a poet and freelance writer. Her collections Explaining Magnetism (1991), Kissing A Bone (1996) and The Silvering (2016) were Poetry Book Society recommendations. Life Under Water (2008) and Kissing a Bone were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Maura has also edited poetry anthologies and essay collections. She was a Centre Director at the Arvon Foundation and founded the Southbank Centre’s Literature programme. Maura has been a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the National Poetry Competition, and has chaired the Poetry Book Society. She is now based in London, and is Reader in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

The Celestial Announcer is here.

Jane Draycott (born 1954)

Jane is a poet and translator who has been nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Poetry, and several of her collections have been Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her collection Over was shortlisted for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. Jane was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation poets in 2004 and won the 2014 Hippocrates International Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Her audio, film and collaborative work has won awards, including BBC Radio 3 Poem-for-Radio, and she has been poet-in-residence in Amsterdam and at the River & Rowing Museum in Henley, Oxfordshire. Jane teaches at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.

The Levitation of St Christina is here.

Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955)

Carol Ann was born in Glasgow. She grew up in Stafford and then attended the University of Liverpool, where she studied Philosophy. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread and Forward Prizes, as well as the Lannan Award and the E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was Poet Laureate 2009–2019, and in 2012 she was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. Away and See / In Your Mind is on page are here and here.