Bill Hays grew up in County Durham alongside Sid Chaplin and co-produced Close the Coalhouse Door.

Geoff Hattersley was born in South Yorkshire in 1956. His many collections of poetry include Port of Entry (Littlewood 1989), Don’t Worry (Bloodaxe 1994), Harmonica (Wrecking Ball 2003), and Back of Beyond (Smith Doorstop 2006).

His poems have been broadcast on local and national radio and have been used as part of syllabuses in schools, universities, and with The Open University. He is an experienced reader of his poetry and has performed and recorded musical arrangements of his poems.

He edited The Wide Skirt Press from 1986 until 1998, publishing 30 issues of the magazine and 24 books and pamphlets. He is an experienced creative writing tutor and was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Huddersfield University.

A new collection, Outside the Blue Hebium, was published by Smith Doorstop Books in July 2012.

Robert Hass was born in 1941 in San Francisco. He served as US Poet Laureate in 1995-97. His many awards include a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Time and Materials (2007), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Sun Under Wood (1996). His first collection Field Guide was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1973. His latest book of poetry is The Apple Trees at Olema: New & Selected Poems (Ecco, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2011). Hass also worked with Czeslaw Milosz to translate a dozen books of Milosz’s poetry, including Treatise on Poetry and, most recently, A Second Space. His translations of the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) and Now and Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns (2007). He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

Kevin Hart was born in 1954 in the village of Ockenden near London, and grew up in London and Brisbane. He has published several books of poetry in Britain, Australia and America, including Flame Tree: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2002) and his latest collection, Young Rain (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). His award-winning poetry has been translated into several languages, including Chinese. He is also the author of several volumes of literary criticism and theology. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

J.S. Harry was born in 1939 in South Australia, and has lived in Sydney for most of her life. She has worked as an editor for Radio National and has held a residency at Australian National University. She has published eight collections of poetry, including the deer under the skin (1971), Hold, for a little while, and turn gently (1979), A Dandelion for Van Gogh (1985), The Life on Water and the Life Beneath (1995), Selected Poems (1995), winner of the NSW Premier's Award for Poetry, Sun Shadow, Moon Shadow (2000), If…And the Movable Ground (2004), and her complete collection of Peter Henry Lepus rabbit poems, Not Finding Wittgenstein (Giramondo, Australia, 2007; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2012).