Saturday October 29th  7.30 – 9.00
 
Em Strang teaches Creative Writing and Creative Reading at Dumfries prison, is Poetry Editor for the Dark Mountain Project and completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2013.  She was a recipient of a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award the following year. Work has been published widely in anthologies and journals, been commended and shortlisted in several prestigious competitions  and selected for the Forward Anthology in 2016. Her illustrated pamphlet, Stone, was published by Atlantic Press in collaboration with artist, Mat Osmond March 2016 (all proceeds going to Scottish charity, Trees for Life). Bird-Woman (Shearsman, 2016) is her first full collection.
 
"Em Strang’s poetry reminds us that right dwelling is not just a theoretical or ideological concern; it must also be rooted in the gravity that structures everything, rich in the old pagan knowledge and unafraid to find a home for what we do not fully understand. Bird-Woman is a delicious collection, a book to be savoured in the fullest sense."  —John Burnside
 
"Em Strang's poems are shamanic, in that they restore to us abandoned mythologies.  Nothing is stable in this very real world, where houses can become birds, where the animal lies shallowly below the surface of the human, where poems are haunted with what is unsaid. An 'old throat from the other side', full of bewilderment, concern, passion and beauty."  —Jen Hadfield