Jamie Hale is an award-winning poet and facilitator, founder of CRIPtic Arts, and one of the 10 most influential disabled people in the arts (Shaw Trust, 2022-24). Their work explores themes of nature, body and mortality through a 'crip' lens, embedding disability in form and content. They were a Jerwood Poetry Fellow 2021-22, their pamphlet, Shield, was published by Verve Press, and their award-winning show, NOT DYING / Quality of Life is Not a Measurable Outcome has been performed and screened worldwide.

Polly Atkin (FRSL) is a poet and nonfiction writer. She grew up in Nottingham and lived in East London for seven years before moving north to Cumbria. She has published three poetry pamphlets and two collections – Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) and Much With Body (Seren: 2021), a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation and Laurel Prize 2022 longlistee. Her nonfiction includes Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021), a Barbellion-longlisted biography of Dorothy’s later life and illness; and a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability, Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre: 2023), a longlistee of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2024, and Lakeland Book of the Year 2024. Her third nonfiction book is a love song to the owls of Lakeland, The Company of Owls (Elliott and Thompson: 2024). Her work is included in various anthologies, including Moving Mountains (Footnote: 2023).

She works as a freelancer from her home in the English Lake District. In 2023 she and her partner took ownership of historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.
Image credit - Alex Muir Photography

Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist, translator and editor from Jakarta, based in London. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, environmental justice, and access as translation. She regularly teaches, mentors, judges, and consults for arts organisations, and has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. Among her honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. She was the first Poet-in-Residence at Modern Poetry in Translation, and later became the magazine’s first non-British Editor. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in the Arts and Culture Category.

Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, as co-editor), Rope (Nine Arches), Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches). Her speculative nonfiction debut, Annah, Infinite, is a translation of a painting, forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press in June 2025.

Image credit Matthew Thompson