Candlestick Press

Biographies

Here you can find out more about the huge range of poets we feature in our pamphlets and the artists whose work appears on our beautiful covers.

We’ve now published poems by almost 700 historical and contemporary poets. In our pages you’ll find old favourites alongside twenty-first century voices – everyone from WH Auden to Benjamin Zephaniah. Although our emphasis is on British poetry, you’ll also find Irish, American and Australian writers.

We hope these pages will encourage you to explore further the work of a poet you’ve enjoyed in one of our pamphlets.

  • Maggie Smith

    Maggie Smith is an American poet, writer, editor tand teacher based in Columbus, Ohio. She has published several books of poetry and prose, including Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017) and a memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which was a New York Times bestseller. Poems and essays have also appeared in The Guardian, the Paris Review and the anthology The Best American Poetry.

    Featured in

  • Stevie Smith

    Stevie Smith (1902 – 1971) lived all her life in Palmer’s Green, North London, and wrote fiction and poetry. Her several collections of poetry were often accompanied by her own quirky line drawings and throughout the 1960s she was a popular performer of her work.

    Featured in

  • Tracy K Smith

    Tracy K Smith is currently US Poet Laureate and teaches creative writing at Princeton University. She has published several poetry collections, including Life on Mars which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and Wade in the Water (Penguin, 2018) which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in the UK. Her memoir Ordinary Light explores ideas of race, faith and her own creativity.

    Featured in

  • Liz Soar

    Liz Soar (b 1976) studied French at New College, Oxford and now teaches English at Headington School in Oxford.  Her poem ‘She’s a game old bird’ was written on Claire Askew’s ‘Creatrix’ course with the Poetry School.

    Featured in

  • Carla Sofia Ferreira

    Carla Sofia Ferreira is an American poet and teacher from Newark, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in a large number of journals and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection is A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us (River River Books, 2024).

    Featured in

  • Mahendra Solanki

    Mahendra Solanki is a poet, editor and Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. He was born in Nairobi, moving to the UK as a child, and his poetry often draws on this background. His first collection was Shadows of My Making (1986) and his most recent is The Lies We Tell (2014). He has worked as poet-in-residence in a secure prison and for First Story at the Nottingham Children’s Hospital.

    Featured in