Rebecca Faulker is a London-born poet based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest and the 2021 Prometheus Unbound Poetry Competition. Her work has been anthologized in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021 and published in journals in the UK and USA. Rebecca was a 2021 Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She holds a BA in English Literature & Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, and a Ph.D. from the University of London.

The poems in her debut collection, Permit Me to Write My Own Ending (Write Bloody Press, 2023) span generations and timescapes – from gritty, defiant explorations of a London adolescence, to haunting poems detailing love and adulthood in the US. Faulkner’s language and form dissects the emotional impact of historical trauma, navigating and sharply reframing nationality and memory, interiority and history. Depictions of London during the Blitz and post-war Berlin sit alongside poems about motherhood and childhood from the perspective of one of Freud’s most famous patients. In this defiant debut collection, the act of writing boldly confronts a landscape dominated by patriarchal notions of the female, deftly redefining it with language and vivid imagery. Faulkner unapologetically writes her own ending.

Francesca Bell, well, we’ll refer you to the bio on her website! Her second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers us an exacting view of the audiologist’s booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss of her own hearing and the mental illness spreading its dark wings over her family. This is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities. What Small Sound wrestles with some of the broadest, most complicated issues of our time and also with the most fundamental issue of all: love. How it shelters and anchors us. How it breaks us and, ultimately, how it pieces us back together.

Dion O’Reilly has one collection out and one forthcoming. Her debut collection, Ghost Dogs, was runner-up for The Catamaran Prize and shortlisted for The Eric Hoffer Award. Her second book Sadness of the Apex Predator will be published by University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press in 2024. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She facilitates private workshops, hosts a podcast at The Hive Poetry Collective, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Quarterly. Most recently, her poem “The Value of Tears” was chosen by the poet Denise Duhamel as winner of the Glitter Bomb Award.