How to be a Poet

About Jane CommaneJo Bell

Jo Bell was born in Sheffield and grew up on the fringes of the Derbyshire Peak District leaving school just after the Miners Strike. She became an industrial archaeologist specialising in coal and lead mines. A winner of the Charles Causley Prize and the Manchester Cathedral Prize she was the first Canal Laureate for the UK appointed by the Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust. She lives on a narrowboat on the English waterways. Kith (Nine Arches Press) is Jo Bells second collection of poems. Jane Commane is a poet editor and publisher. Her first full-length collection Assembly Lines was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme for a decade she also worked in museums and archives and in 2016 she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands Room 204 writer development programme Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press co-editor of Under the Radar magazine and is co-author with Jo Bell of How to Be a Poet a creative writing handbook (Nine Arches Press).In 2017 she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. In 2019 Jane was commissioned by Historic England and the Poetry Society as part of the Where Light Falls project to write a poem alongside community groups which was projected onto the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and viewed by over 15000 people over three nights as part of a music poetry and light installation.