PoetryEtc Featured Poet: Liz Kirby

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Biography

My mother spent the later months of her pregnancy listening to Under Milk Wood on a set of LPs that had been given to her for her birthday.  She always claimed that I turned out to be a poet because I had absorbed the sounds of Dylan Thomas in the womb.  Being brought up in a Medieval Chippie in Warwick added a potent extra flavour to the brew. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t write.  Little spiral bound notebooks, letters and journals, and as I got older, poems.  For me writing has always been bound up with being alive.  It is one of the important ways I know I exist.

I have a long history of publication in journals, which has recently included Famous Reporter, The Rialto, and _dANDdelion.  Over the years I have also been involved in a number of women’s writing groups, including Out Of Bounds (English and Welsh women working together, including Rose Flint and Pauline Stainer), and Northern Dyke Writers.  Out of this came the small press called Hot Fish, which launched a couple of very successful hand made books (very sparkly and shiny productions they were too!).  I have also read in venues as diverse as the civic grandeur of Manchester Town Hall, and the intimate ‘In the Midst’ series of reading and performance in Montréal.

I currently live on the border of England and Canada, and teach literature, linguistics and creative writing in  Stoke-On –Trent – the famous ‘Potteries’, home of Wedgwood.  The Royal Dalton factory shop is right next to the entrance to my college.

My current work tends to move out from points in the literary tradition – Shakespeare in the case of Her Red Crown  and  Lorca in Remedies of Water.  Both selections come from larger works in which a range of themes and threads are worked together.  Her Red Crown consists of thirteen parts in all, and Remedies of Water is a book length manuscript, of which I have simply tried to give a taste.