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Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was a major American poet who studied in the USA and then in the UK, where she settled. Her volumes of poetry, including her posthumously-published collection, Ariel, established her as one of the most important poets of her generation, alongside her husband, Ted Hughes. Although controversy surrounded and continues to surround her early death by suicide, the importance of her work (she is credited with creating what has become known as a ‘confessional’ genre of poetry) and its contribution to the course of twentieth-century poetry, are beyond controversy.

Stanley Plumly was a prolific American poet who loved the English Romantics and wrote a book about John Keats. His 2009 collection Old Heart (2009) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist in the National Book Award. He was Maryland Poet Laureate for many years.

Rachel Plummer is a UK poet who was born in London and lives in Edinburgh. She was a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writer Award for poetry in 2016 and has had poems published in magazines including Mslexia, The Dark Horse, The Stinging Fly and Agenda.  Her pamphlet of sci-fi poems The Parlour Guide to Exo-Politics (House Press, 2017) imagines aliens landing in Scotland’s ancient woodland and explores themes such as gender and homelessness.

Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, Cumbria. He has published a novel and four collections of poetry, including most recently Jackself (Picador, 2016) which won the TS Eliot Prize. His poetry is characterised by a lyric intensity, often harnessing strange and unsettling aspects of the natural world. His work also contains elements of folklore, riddle and nursery rhyme.

Bethany W Pope is an award-winning British-American writer who currently lives in China. Pope’s work includes the poetry collections A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012), Undisturbed Circles (Lapwing, 2014).  In 2016 Indigo Dreams published a poetry collection The Rag and Boneyard and a novel entitled Masque.

Jessie Pope (1868 – 1941) was an English poet, writer and journalist based in Leicester and best known for her patriotic poetry encouraging enlistment in World War One. Her work came under scrutiny from poets such as Wilfred Owen, who dedicated his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1917) to her in direct response. She was a regular contributor to The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and Vanity Fair, and also wrote for children. Her poems are sometimes used in schools as a contrast to the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.