Kerry Hardie, the Clydebuilt 9 mentees, and their mentor Liz Lochhead will all be reading at the last Mirrorball of the season on Thursday May 25th at 7pm in the Clubroom of the CCA. This event is preceded by the St. Mungo’s Mirrorball AGM at 6pm for those that can make it.

Kerry Hardie has published seven collections of poetry, her most recent being The Zebra Stood in the Dark , Bloodaxe Books. She has published two novels, (Harper Collins; Little, Brown) and is finishing a third. Her verse play [written with Olivia O’Leary], To Find a Heathen Place and Sound a Bell was broadcast in 2015.
Liz Lochhead and the Clydebuilt 9 mentees: Juana Adcock, R. A. Davies, Finola Scott, KatieAiles, Ciara MacLaverty.

Ciara MacLaverty was born in Belfast, grew up on Islay and lives in Glasgow. She is a current recipient of a 2017 New Writer’s Award form the Scottish Book Trust. Her poems have appeared in The Scotsman, New Writing Scotland and Gutter. On twitter she describes herself as Writer, Mother, occassionally other.

R.A. Davis was born in Edinburgh in 1983 to a Welsh mother and English father. Robin spent his childhood in the suburbs of Canterbury in Kent. At fourteen, his family moved to the Isle of Anglesey, North Wales, where his bedroom window looked out on the Irish Sea and the mountains of Snowdonia. In 2002, summoned by Scotland’s indie music scene, Robin came to study an undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow and has belonged to the city ever since. He gained his MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University part-time while working six days a week in a greengrocers’. He now earns a living as a bookseller. He has written for the Glasgow Review of Books, and both his poetry and prose have been published in Gutter.

Katie Ailes is a poet and PhD candidate currently based in Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the performance of authentic selfhood in contemporary U.K. spoken word poetry. Katie placed second in the 2015 Scottish National Poetry Slam and has performed across the U.KShe organises, composes, and performs with the spoken word collective Loud Poets. She released her first pamphlet, Homing, in 2015, and was published in the House of Three anthology series in 2016.

Finola Scott has been writing since she retired. Her short stories and poems are widely published in anthologies and magazines including The Ofi Press, Raum, Dactyl ,The Lake, Poets’ Republic, The Eildon Tree. A performance poet she is also proud to be a slam-winning granny.

Juana Adcock is a poet and translator working in English and Spanish. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications including Magma Poetry, Gutter, Glasgow Review of Books, Asymptote and Words Without Borders. Her first book, Manca, explores the anatomy of violence in Mexico and was named by Reforma’s distinguished critic Sergio González Rodríguez as one of the best poetry books published in 2014. In 2016 she was named one of the ‘Ten New Voices from Europe’ by Literature Across Frontiers.

St Mungo Mirrorball