Emma Conway is a poet whose work addresses the role of languages in shaping identity and the collective encounter, examining the function and power of spoken, written and visual forms of communication. Founded on explorations of the inter-lingual forms of concrete poetry, this practice utilises a variety of media to work through embodied interactions with languages, objects and language-objects. Currently based in London, Emma has an MA in Poetic Practice from Royal Holloway, and is currently working on a practice-based PhD at DeMontfort University in Leicester. For POLYply she will be performing a piece from her ongoing serial project bodies of work, which has included previous performances in London and Tokyo. Ideas of translation inform the process, which centres on the circulation and exchange of language and forms between the works produced. In this series, each text, performance or video functions as its own language-space to be activated and transformed by the audience, producing materials which will form the basis for the next stage of the project.
Ian Davidson is a poet and a critic. He has published four full length collections of poetry and a number of pamphlets, of which ’Into Thick Hair’ is the most recent (Wild Honey 2010). His critical writing explores relationships between literature, spatial theory and mobility. His most recent book is Radical Spaces of Poetry (Palgrave 2010) and he is currently working on his next, Writing, Mobility and Motion. He is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University.
Juha Virtanen received his doctorate from the University of Kent in 2013, where he currently works as an Assistant Lecturer. His academic publications and conference presentations have discussed writers such as Charles Olson, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, and Allen Ginsberg, often in a performance context. In addition, he is currently acting as an editorial assistant for a collection of letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay. His poetry has previously appeared in Halfcircle, Intercapillary Space, SNOW, Veer About, Vile Products and elsewhere.
Jennifer Walshe is a composer, performer and visual artist of whom the Irish Times has said that “without a doubt, hers is the most original compositional voice to emerge in Ireland in the last 20 years”. She studied composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and at Northwestern University, Chicago, graduating with a doctoral degree in composition in 2002. A winner of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany in 2000, she returned to the Ferienkurse in July 2002 to lecture in composition. She was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart between 2003 and 2004, and from 2004-05 she lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York and in 2008 received the Praetorius Music Prize for Composition by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur.
cris cheek, self-described “poet-pedagogue, writer-critic, book artist-publisher, new media practitioner and interdisciplinary performer,” earned his PhD at Lancaster (UK), and has been involved in the creative literary and artistic activities since 1975. cheek works in various spheres of the contemporary art, incorporating a wide range of media-strategies and technologies into his projects. For many years he has developed the ideas of live-art, spontaneous literary performance and “chaotic declamation” on his own and as member of various musical and poetic groups including jgjgjgjg (in collab. with P.C. Fencott, L. Upton), CoAccident, Garam Masala, Slant (in collab. with Ph. Jeck, S. Jones). cheek is the author of a number of poetry editions and books; he has worked with live-writing with simultaneous video transmission; he is a critic and he frequently works as a collaborative writer.
