School of Night: Poetry with Tracey Herd and Chrissy Williams

The School of Night – inspired by the group which included Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh – is our Year Round Poetry Festival.  Playing host to poets as varied as Paul Muldoon and Lorraine Mariner, Simon Armitage and Annie Freud it is anchored to a regular fixture on the first Tuesday of every month. The School of Night offers the chance to explore and discuss the work of some of the best poets on the contemporary scene.

Recommencing after the brief hiatus, we will be joined by Don Paterson to welcome Tracey Herd and Chrissy Williams.

Scottish poet Tracey Herd won an Eric Gregory Award in 1993, and in 1995 was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Bursary. Her first collection No Hiding Place earned her nomination for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and  then in 2001 her second collection Dead Redhead  was a Poetry Book Recommendation. From 1998 to 2001 Tracey occupied the esteemed position of Creative Writing Fellow of the University of Dundee, later going on to be a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, then Lector. This year she brings us the long awaited and utterly brilliant Not in This World. Tracey ’s work is filled with powerful tensions between female vulnerability and black humour, a most beguiling voice in contemporary poetry – not surprising then that Not in This World  is shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize as well as being this winter’s Poetry Books Society choice!

Chrissy Williams, whose quirky, original pamphlets from Seven Poems to Epigraph have already garnered great critical response, is a fascinating new talent, combining the worlds of poetry and comic-books. Chrissy is a freelance editor and writer, currently teaching poetry at the University of Hertfordshire and worked as the Digital Coordinator and Comics Editor at the Poetry Library.