Monday, September 15th, 2003 - Keith Armstrong and Paul Summers

KEITH ARMSTRONG was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he has worked as a community worker, poet and publisher. Armstrong is coordinator of the Northern Voices creative writing and community publishing project which specializes in recording the experiences of people in the North East of England. He was founder of the Strong Words and Durham Voices community publishing series and of Tyneside Street Press, and he has recently compiled and edited books on the Durham Miners' Gala and on the former mining communities of County Durham. He was Year of the Artist 2000 poet-in-residence at Hexham Races. He has written for music-theatre productions, including 'O'er the Hills' and 'Wor Jackie' (1988) for Northumberland Theatre Company; 'Pig's Meat' (1997 & 2000) for Bruvvers Theatre Company; and 'The Roker Roar' (1998) for Monkwearmouth Youth Theatre Company. He won the Kate Collingwood Bursary Award in 1986. He worked as a Community Arts Development Worker in East Durham for 6 years in the 1980s and has long pioneered cultural exchanges with Durham's twinning partners, particularly Tuebingen and Nordenham in Germany and Ivry-sur-Seine and Amiens in France, as well as with Newcastle's Dutch twin-city of Groningen. He has won Northern Arts Awards to visit Berlin in 1990 and in 2001 to pursue his studies of Dutch regional culture. His travels to Denmark, Germany, Holland and Sweden have also been supported by the British Council. He was the Judge for the Sid Chaplin Short Story Awards in 2000. He often works with folk-musicians from North East England, including Jez Lowe, Marie Little, and George Welch, and he has written the lyrics for an album by folk-rock band 'The Whisky Priests', with whom he has toured extensively in The Netherlands.

PAUL SUMMERS’s first full collection of poetry, “The Last Bus,” introduces one of the best young poets writing in the North-East today. Paul Summers' work absorbs its region's identity and culture, and from it creates verse that is provocative, original and highly charged.

'It is packed with irony, wit- and also some tremendously direct lyricism drawing on a sharp intelligence and keen observations of every day street circus behaviour…This is poetry of the real kind with a real voice, and you'd be a fool to miss it.' - Barry MacSweeney