Pauline Plummer writes poetry and short stories. Her verse novella From Here to Timbuktu, was chosen as a Read Regional by New Writing North for 2012. She has won prizes in various national poetry and short story competitions, including the Ilkley Literature Festival 2012. She was poet laureate of Middlesbrough in 2000 and has collaborated with a painter in an exhibition titled Palaver that travelled the UK in the late 90s. Her short stories have been published in anthologies by Comma Press, Biscuit Publishing, New Writing North, Orbis and The Journal.

She has read her work on BBC Radio 4, Tyne Tees TV, Sierra Leone national TV and for the British Council. She tutors creative writing at Northumbria University and for the Open University, but also works in the community with children, the elderly and refugees. She also works as an editor for Mudfog Press, Teesside. And has published a collection of poems and short prose pieces by schoolchildren and students in Sierra Leone.

The Political and Economic Planning (PEP) was a British policy think tank, formed in 1931.

Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and lives in London. She has published four collections with Bloodaxe: The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998), which she wrote while still at school, Bedtime (2002), Look, Clare! Look! (2005) and Changeling, which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her translation Ovid's Heroines is published by Bloodaxe in 2013. Her first play The Weather (Faber, 2004) premièred at the Royal Court Theatre. She works as an editor, broadcaster and teacher. Her documentary for radio, My Male Muse (2007), was a Radio 4 Pick of the Year. She is co-editor, with James Byrne, of the anthology Voice Recognition: 21 poets for the 21st century (Bloodaxe Books, 2009).