Digital Residencies with The Writing Squad

Kit Byford won the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2024 and The Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize 2025. They are an alum of the Barbican Young Poets, The Writing Squad and The London Library Emerging Writers Programme, and they were a Britten Pears Young Artist 23-24. They were a co-founder of the Dead [Women] Poets Society and their pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, is published with ignitionpress. Their work has appeared in Magma, bath magg, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Wales and Propel, and in numerous anthologies, most recently A Midnight Treasury of Macabre and Weird Poems (Rizzoli UK) and Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices (Bloomsbury). Kit is writing their first collection of poems with the support of an Arts Council DYCP grant.

Instagram: @kitbyford

Web: www.kmrbyford.com

Ellen Waters is a Manchester-born poet whose work has been featured in Viral Verses: Art in Exceptional Times, Indigo Literary Journal, and JFA Human Rights Journal. She is a Writing Squad alum and an upcoming member of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, and has worked for multiple creative writing charities expanding access to the arts. She has written with The Poetry Society and New Writing North, worked on a poetry engagement project at The Yorkshire Museum, and co-edited two literary magazines for Northern creatives.

Instagram: @ellen.aurora