Meet the 2024 Poetry Challenge Finalists
Gang Pan
Gang Pan was born in China, as the Miao nationality from Guizhou Province. He got a MPA from the University of Birmingham and lived in Birmingham for around 3 years. He is a new poet and started both writing Chinese and English poetry this year. He would like to write poems to fill the emptiness and needs of the soul, and he hopes to use poems as weapons against the unseen darkness. So he joined the 2024 Togetherness Poetry Challenge aimed at using poetry to notice the meaning of togetherness and impact the sense of human beings.
Aisha Mohamud
Aisha is Somali, and immigrated to the UK when she was 5 years old. As she recently began a journey of processing and healing trauma, she started looking for a creative outlet to help, which is when she found poetry. While struggling to come to terms with her identity, she wrote the poem “Dissonance and Harmony” and entered the Togetherness challenge in hopes that someone like her would be able to relate to her poem and feel seen.
Olga Dermott-Bond
Olga is originally from Northern Ireland, and lives in Warwickshire where she works as a Secondary school teacher. She has published two pamphlets: apple, fallen (Against the Grain Press, 2020) and A Sky full of strange specimens (Nine Pens Press, 2021). Her first full collection Frieze, published by Nine Arches Press, was recently featured in The Guardian. She has won competitions including the BBC Proms poetry competition, Welshpool and Poetry on Loan poetry competitions. She is currently a managing editor for Irish poetry journal Dodging the Rain. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and poet in residence for the Coffin Works Museum in Birmingham.
Steve Lott
Steve has been a teacher for 30 years. He is married to Jen, and has three children. Steve has always been interested in writing. He has been writing poetry on and off, all of his adult life. His poetry stems from personal and everyday experiences, what he’s read in a paper, an overheard conversation – that he then embellishes, his family’s situations, or simply how he’s feeling. The poem entered for this project stemmed from a chance situation.
Alison Milner
Alison Milner lives on a steep wooded hillside at the edge of the Pennines in West Yorkshire. This moorland scenery, where horizons wave like a vast inland sea, provides the canvas for much of her poetry and prose.
Alison likes to explore internal landscapes through her writing. She is interested in the stories we tell to others and to ourselves, the narratives people create to better understand their lives. She is inspired by the power that words, written or spoken, can have to connect people together, to braid diverse experiences, to weave collaboration and respect. Some of her writing has previously been published in four literary magazines and three anthologies.
