Monday, April 19th, 2004:
Keith Armstrong & Katrina Porteous

Keith Armstrong was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he has worked as a community worker, poet and publisher Keith 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. See more about Keith Armstrong and photos from his performance at Alchemy.

Katrina Porteous is based on the Northumberland coast. Many of the poems in her first collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe 1996), explore the life of the local fishing community. She has led poetry classes for adults and children from Cornwall to the Shetland Islands, where she was writer-in-residence from 1996-7. She has worked on many collaborations with other artists, including the CD-ROM Book of the North. Together with piper Chris Ormston, she recorded a CD/book of her long Northumbrian dialect poem, The Wund an' the Wetter (Iron Press 1999).

Last year Katrina worked on the Northumberland Millennium Musical Tam Lin with composer Alistair Anderson. She also worked on the film Village By the Sea, and on a film-poem for Poetry International. She has recently written poems for Michael Johnson's artworks at Seaham Harbour and Easington Colliery. Other recent commissions include a horseback poem for Radio 4's National Poetry Day celebration, a long poem about Hadrian's Wall, and a poem for Radio 3's Poetry Proms. These can be found on the BBC website: Katrina's latest publication is Turning the Tide, a collaboration with two artists on the Durham coal-coast.