Five more evenings of women's poetry, hosted by Angela Dove of Poetryworks.

Cats Night Out is a vibrant and eclectic mix of the best of contemporary women's poetry in a relaxed atmosphere. There's also a chance for new voices to air their talent in a limited number of floor spots for women.

This season's poets includes: Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, Marilyn Hacker and Cherry Smyth.

Many more to be announced soon...watch this space!

Tuesday 10 February:

Monica Alvi

Monica Alvi was born in Pakistan in 1954 and grew up in Hertfordshire. She has published four books of poetry including The Country At My Shoulder which was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002 and a volune of her poems in translation was published in Holland last year

"Moniza Alvi's world is a place of wild energy..."PBS Bulletin

Kate Clanchy

Kate Clanchy won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Slattern, gaining her a reputation as a poet of great immediacy and wit. This has been followed by Samarkand and her latest, and most accomplished book to date Newborn which considers the incredible experience of having a baby.

"A real discovery" Helen Dunmore

Cherry Smyth

Cherry Smyth is author of When The Lights Go Up (Lagan Press,2001) and editor of A Strong Voice In A Small Space (Cherry Picking Press, 2002) an anthology of poems by women in prison which won the Raymond Williams Community Publishing Award in 2003.
Being Irish informs her work which also appears in several anthologies and includes the screenplay for the short film Salvage.

Tuesday 16 March:

Polly Clark

Polly Clark won an Eric Gregory Award in 1997 and her first collection Kisswas a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has pursued a number of careers including zookeeping at Edinburgh Zoo. She was one of the 2001 National Poetry Day Poets, selected by Andrew Motion and in 2004 was chosen as one of Mslexia's ten best poets to emerge in the last decade. She is poet in residence for the Daily Echo in Southampton, and is currently a guest editor for Poetry London Magazine.

Rita Ann Higgins

One of Ireland's liveliest and most popular poets she is a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the Irish dispossessed, who writes provocative and heartwarming poems of high jinks, jittery grief and telling social comment. Born in Galway, where she still lives, she left school at 14, and was in her late 20s when she started writing poetry. She has published seven books of poetry. An Awful Racket is her latest collection from Bloodaxe.

'A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues - a witty mix of the erotic and the upfront political from a female perspective.'
Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday

Kona Macphee

Kona Macphee was born in London, and grew up in Australia. She's worked as a waitress, shop assistant and apprentice motorbike mechanic, studied musical composition at the Sydney Conservatorium, and computer science and robotics at Monash University, and currently works in astronomy as a software developer. She received an Eric Gregory Award for poetry in 1998. Her first full collection, Tails is an auspicious debut by a highly original writer who has already been called 'one of the strongest new figures in British poetry' Roddy Lumsden.

Tuesday 20 April:

Sheenagh Pugh

Sheenagh Pugh is a poet,translator and novelist who was born in Wales and lives in Cardiff. Her vivid, richly inventive and accessible poetry has many admirers and she has won numerous awards, including the Forward Prize for best single poem, The Babel Prize for translation, and The Cardiff International Poetry Prize. Her ninth collection, The Beautiful Lie (Seren) deals with the boundaries between truth and fiction. She is a lecturer in creative writing at The University of Glamorgan.

"Sheenagh Pugh is a very wicked poet". Roger McGough

Aoife Mannix

An exhilarating performance poet, Aoife Mannix was born in Stockholm of Irish parents and grew up in Dublin and New York. She won the Farrago Poetry Slam in 2001, and has performed her poetry internationally, most recently as part of a British Council tour of Austria. Her first chapbook,The Trick of Foreign Words has just been published by Tall Lighthouse. Her poetry and short stories have been broadcast and widely published in magazines and anthologies, and she has written two drama documentaries for BBC Radio 4.

Kapka Kassabova

Kapka Kassabova is a young Bulgarian émigré poet, and this reading marks a rare visit from her present home, New Zealand. She gained The New Zealand Society of Authors Award for best first poetry collection, and her first UK poetry book, Someone Else's Life was published by Bloodaxe in 2003. Reflecting on the turbulence of 20th century Europe, she paints "a truly international picture of what it means to be young and sensitive in the modern world and has already established a unique literary identity." Clive James

Tuesday 11 May:

Angela Kirby

Angela Kirby is one of poetry's most naturally engaging and expressive communicators, born in rural Lancashire she has worked as a chef, painter, garden designer, journalist and non fiction writer, apart from bringing up five children. Her poems have been rightly appreciated for their candour, wit and elegance of form and widely anthologised and published in magazines. They have featured on BBC's Woman's Hour and Poetry Please, and she has twice won the BBC's Wildlife Poet of the Year. In 2003 she received a commendation in The National Poetry Competition. Her first collection will be published by Shoestring Press in 2005.

"Angela Kirby's poems delight with feisty detail and move us with their honesty and directness" Maurice Riordan

Patience Agbabi

Internationally renowned poet and performer Patience Agbabi has written two collections of poetry, Transformatrix and her first collection, R.A.W. which won the Excelle Literary Award for Poetry. She is a sought-after performer and workshop facilitator and has performed world-wide on British Council sponsored projects and independent engagements including visits to South Africa, Switzerland, Germany and Zimbabwe. She tutors widely in creative writing and performance and has run courses for the Arvon Foundation, Poetry Society, Spread the Word and various universities. She was selected for the Poetry-In-Places Scheme run by the Poetry Society and was resident poet at The Poetry Society and a London-based tattoo parlour, Flamin' 8. She was Poet-in-Residence at Oxford Brookes University until July 2001. She is currently an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University and until summer 2003, was visiting lecturer at the University of Greenwich. She is currently working on her third book Body Language.

Cheryl Follon

Cheryl Follon is a feisty new Scottish writer who presents a wild carnival of bawdy tale-telling, songs and boisterous monologues, with a lively and often very wicked wit. All Your Talk, her debut collection published by Bloodaxe has been lauded for its earthiness and sensuality.

"A feast of a book - a stunningly robust debut collection." Brendan Kennelly

Tuesday 15 June:

MARY BAINE CAMPBELL

Mary Baine Campbell is an American poet and literary critic. Her first collection, THE WORLD, The Flesh and Angels, won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and her second and recent collection, Trouble, is published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She teaches at Brandeis University, is the author of two books of literary criticism and cultural history, and is currently working on a libretto about a werewolf and his wife.

"Lucid, haunting, irresistibly truthtelling poetry." Eve Sedgwick about Trouble

ANGELA DOVE

Angela Dove was born and raised in Yorkshire and has had careers as a theatre designer, actor, and a teacher in museums. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines, in the anthology Four Caves Of The Heart (Second Light Publications), and in Parents ( Enitharmon). Her first pamphlet collection is Cabinet of Wonders (Vernier Press). She founded and directs the Cats Night Out series of poetry readings, and writes, teaches and researches on the design of libraries and other learning spaces.

"This is wild, disturbing poetry, and in their deceptive way, these poems are profoundly theatrical - a genuinely exciting collection." UA Fanthorpe on Cabinet of Wonders

MARILYN HACKER

A rare opportunity to hear Marilyn Hacker, one of the USA's strongest poets of conscience, reading from her work. Author of ten books, her numerous honours include a National Book Award for Presentation Piece. In her latest collection Desperanto, she writes of two cities, her native New York and adopted Paris, and continues to explore her abiding themes of loss, exile and return, with a searching intelligence and urbane humour.

"There is no finer poet alive than Marilyn Hacker." Carolyn Kizer

"Swift and unfailing intellect carried by delectable tunes and tones: these are signal Hacker poems." Marie Ponsot on Desperanto