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.
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Johnnie Sparkle
Johnnie Sparkle is a retired mental health nurse, public health worker and jazz loving anagram from the West Midlands. He took up writing poetry following retirement and likes dogs, cats, trees, water and the sound of other people. He is grateful to the NHS for giving him a job and saving his life twice. So far.
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Roberta Spear
Roberta Spear (1948 – 2003) was an American poet. She grew up in California and published three collections of poetry. A posthumous collection of her work A Sweetness Rising: New and Selected Poems (2007) was edited by Philip Levine who highlighted her relish for using her poems to tell exotic stories about imaginary characters.
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Meda AA Stamper
Meda AA Stamper is a minister and writer of poetry who was born in NYC and raised in the American South. She studied and worked in Paris and was then a writer in corporate affairs at The Coca-Cola Company before being ordained. Author of Embodying Mark, she has developed one-woman performances of John, Mark and other biblical texts, led retreats on the Ile Saint-Honorat in France, and served in congregational ministry in England, where she now lives.
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Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) was an American writer who moved to Paris in 1903 and stayed there for the remainder of her life. She was a leading figure in the avant-garde and helped to launch the careers of Picasso and Matisse. She tried to achieve in her writing what contemporary painters were doing in their art: to create an experimental non-linear form that broke away from nineteenth century conventions of sense and chronology.
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AN Stencl
Abraham Nahum Stencl (1897 – 1983) was a Jewish poet born in Poland. He emigrated to Berlin in 1936, and subsequently on to Britain. His poetry was admired by many German writers and published in Yiddish and German. He settled in London where he founded the literary journal Loshn un Lebn. Many of his poems have been translated into English. All My Young Years, published in 2007 by Five Leaves Publications, includes a number of his poems printed in English and Yiddish.
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James Stephens
James Stephens (1880 – 1950) was born in Dublin. Alongside original poems he produced many retellings of Irish myths and fairy tales. His first poetry collection Insurrections was published in 1909 and his last Kings and the Moon in 1938. He spent the latter part of his life in London and gained popularity as a result of a series of broadcasts for the BBC.
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