This anthology will showcase a variety of new writing exploring and celebrating tracks and trails, distance and sprints, endurance and training, and the euphoria, challenges and team spirit surrounding running of all forms and paces.
Editors Ben Wilkinson, Kim Moore and Paul Deaton will be selecting the poems they think create the ideal A-team for this anthology, to be published by Smith|Doorstop in October 2019.
The Poetry Business and the Editors invite you to submit your running-themed poems for consideration, along with a 75 word biography including your favourite ways, places and personal motivations to run.
About the Editors:
Paul Deaton was born in London and raised in Wales. A Watchful Astronomy (Seren, October 2017), his debut collection, was a PBS Recommendation and a National Poetry Day selected title. His work appears regularly in The Spectator, is included in York Press for GCSE poetry study guides and in various magazines & anthologies. He has a first degree in psychology, works as a commissioning art editor and addictions counsellor in Bristol. Favourite marathon: London. Favourite race: Exmoor Stagger. Every run is a little life, a proof in living, that you are alive – a bit like poetry.
Kim Moore was born in 1981 and lives and works in Cumbria. Her first full-length collection, The Art of Falling, was published by Seren in April 2015 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She has won a New Writing North Award, an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Her first pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in The Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, judged by Carol Ann Duffy, was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Award and the Lakeland Book of the Year Award.
Ben Wilkinson was born in Staffordshire and now lives in Sheffield. He has won numerous awards for his poetry, including the Poetry Business Competition and a 2014 Northern Writers’ Award. His debut full collection of poems, Way More Than Luck, appeared from Seren Books in February 2018. A keen distance runner and lifelong Liverpool Football Club fan, he writes as poetry critic for the Guardian, among other publications. He teaches creative writing at the University of Bolton.
Submissions:
If you would like your work to be considered for this anthology, send us your best running-themed poems by 1st March 2019. We will contact you by 1st May 2019 to confirm if your poems are to be included. The poems should be no longer than 40 lines long. Please send a maximum of three pieces, along with a 75 word running themed biography.
We welcome imaginative takes on the theme; strange encounters, praise poems, maledictions and anecdotes.
We can only accept poems for which you own publication rights, generally these are previously unpublished, or have only been published in magazines. If you’re not sure, please check with your publisher/magazine editor. If it had been published, please tell us the title and year of publication.
Submit your poems by email to eleanor@poetrybusiness.co.uk with ‘Open Call: Running Anthology’ in the subject line. Please send poems as a word document.
Galloway Writers' Room 