Bison Rule, OK!

I’m a poet, and I especially like writing for children, although I hope readers of any age will find something to enjoy. Here you can find out a little bit more about me, read some of my poems, find out where I have been published lately, find useful links to other poetry sources, or drop me a line.

I was born and grew up in the South Wales valleys, but these days I live in Hertfordshire with my husband, two boys and our tabby cat Sylvester.

My dad (an English teacher and poet himself) used to encourage me to write poems for competitions and I did have a poem in a Cadbury’s collection when I was 11, and a poem that was made into a poster for the London Underground network when was 13, but I think I tried a lot harder to be ‘grown up’ than I do now. Anyway, there was a good 30-year gap before I was published in an anthology again! Still, better late than never.

Not all my poems rhyme, but a lot of them do, and I really enjoy playing with words and making them do the slightly unexpected. I like the way a poem can capture a moment in time, a funny thought or a ‘what if?’

Since my return to poetry, I’ve won the YorkMix Children’s Poems for Children competition in 2021 (having placed third previously), and have had poems highly commended in The Caterpillar Prize by Roger McGough (2020), Michael Morpurgo (2021) and Naomi Shihab Nye (2022). I’m now excitedly ancipating the publication of my debut collection with Troika Books: Why Did My Brain Make Me Say It?