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 800 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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Sarah Kolawole
Sarah ‘Rain’ Kolawole was born in Nottingham and is a performance poet, spoken word artist and an associate artist at the Nottingham Playhouse theatre. Her first play was Notts Sweet Home which toured with the New Perspectives Theatre company. As a performance poet she has performed alongside artists including Benjamin Zephaniah and Salena Godden. She is also a practising social worker.
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Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in Louisiana and served in the US Army from 1969-1970 as a correspondent during the Vietnam War, an experience which later became the subject of his poetry collection, Dien Cai Dau (1988). He studied Creative Writing, his first published poetry collection being Dedications & other Darkhorses (1977). He teaches at New York University and his latest collection is The Emperor of Water Clocks (2015).
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Ted Kooser
Ted Kooser is an American poet and was the country’s 13th Poet Laureate from 2004 – 2006. His poetry is known for its celebration of the ordinariness of everyday life and is often deceptively plain and simple in its diction. His most recent publication is Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2018).
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Beth Krommes
Beth Krommes is an American painter, illustrator, wood engraver and pattern designer. She studied painting at Syracuse University, which included a year abroad at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. She also has a Degree in Textile/Surface Design. Her illustrations for the children’s title The House in the Night (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) by Susan Marie Swanson won a Caldecott Medal. She lives in New Hampshire.
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Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin (1925 – 2014) was an American poet. She had a long and successful writing career, in the course of which she won a Pulitzer Prize. She lived in a farmhouse in rural new Hampshire where she took pride in looking after her garden and her stable of horses. Collections such as Connecting the Dots: Poems (1996) focus on the daily rituals of farm life, while also broaching social and environmental problems such as pollution and religious persecution.
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Zaffar Kunial
Zaffar Kunial is a British poet born in Birmingham who now lives in Yorkshire. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust the same year. In 2011 he won third prize in the National Poetry Competition with ‘Hill Speak’. For several years he worked as a writer for Hallmark Cards.
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