We’ve been fortunate enough to work with the following four emerging poets over the last year, and want to share some of their work with you:
Courtney Conrad
Courtney Conrad is an award-winning poet born and raised in Jamaica and currently based in London. Migrating from Kingston as a teenager, Courtney’s poetry interlaces subversive diasporic image, national political commentary and shatteringly personal narrative.
Courtney’s work is published widely – read her poem ‘Final Destination’ in Propel Magazine here: https://www.propelmagazine.co.uk/courtney-conrad-final-destination
Her debut pamphlet I Am Evidence (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2023) was the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker, and the 2023 Michael Marks Poetry Award.
“Courtney Conrad, what an outstanding, original voice! These poems bear (unbearable) testimony and witness. This is work so rooted and yet transportive, utterly transformative.”
Emily Abdeni-Holman
Emily Abdeni-Holman is a British-Lebanese writer. She grew up in Warlingham (UK) and Jamhour (Lebanon), and worked as an arts and culture writer in Beirut before pursuing a doctorate in literature in the UK. Her first novel, At the Pine House, takes place in Jamhour in the 1960s-70s. She currently lives in Cambridgeshire.
Emily published Body Tectonic with Broken Sleep Books in July 2024. Spanning the first three years of Lebanon’s economic crisis, from October 2019 to October 2022, Body Tectonic is an experiment in news poetry, exploring what it’s like bodily when the ground shifts daily beneath your feet.
“this humane and intelligent work examines at first hand matters laid within our history that ‘cannot be undone’ – and the ways in which, in the face of crisis, the human body ‘knows all over again what’s real’.”
Jane Thomas
Jane Thomas is from The Wirral and is passionate about words, health inequalities, and interbeing. She has been highly commended in the Bridport, Fish, Live Canon, Hippocrates, and The Rialto Pamphlet competitions, and published in Stand, Mslexia, Urthona, Rialto, Envoi and The ORB. She is currently completing a collection on the theme of Alzheimer’s.
Jane’s poem ‘My Father in a Coracle’ was runner-up in the Poetry Society’s 2023 Stanza Poetry Competition on the theme of 'Refuge':
“The first runner up portrays a father circling his own mind, as if in a coracle; an unforgettably tender description of the failing brain as a ‘boat-for-one’”
Alex Mepham
Alex Mepham is a PhD student investigating how background noise impacts speech understanding. Alex’s work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Under the Radar, PROTOTYPE, fourteen poems and more. Read ‘Memorial’ by Alex Mepham on berlin lit here: https://www.berlinlit.com/memorial/
Alex’s poem ‘Dark Matter’ won third place in this year’s Disabled Poets Prize:
