You are invited to listen in as Nick and Nikolai compare notes on their process, and talk about the highs and lows of their writing lives.

About this event
Tuesday March 22 6-7pm (British time) Internationally acclaimed poets Nikolai Duffy and Nick Norton in conversation, in the first international event in this series curated by The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

You are invited to listen in as Nikolai and Nick compare notes on their process, and talk about the highs and lows of their writing lives. There will be an opportunity for Q&A in the last 10minutes.

Nikolai Duffy is a poet, publisher, and critic. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Little Shed of Various Lamps (2013) and Up the Creek (2018), as well as the work of literary criticism, Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop (2013). With the artist, Louise Adkins, he has published two performance texts, Notes for a Performance (2018) and Weather Permitting (2019). He is also the editor of Gap Gardening: The Selected Poems of Rosmarie Waldrop (2016). His poetry has appeared in various British and American magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Rebellion, Shadowtrain, Shearsman, Stride, Blackbox Manifold, E.ratio. His work has been read and performed internationally, including London, Manchester, Dublin, New York, Providence, Columbus, Ljubljana, and Bochum. In 2019 he was awarded a UNESCO City of Literature residency in Ljubljana. In addition, he has published various essays on contemporary poetry, poetics, and visual art. He is the founding editor of Like This Press, publishing handmade collections of poetry, short stories, and essays: www.likethispress.com.

Nikolai is the Assistant Head of the Postgraduate Arts and Humanities Centre, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Nick Norwood’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily, The Oxford American, the PBS NewsHour site Art Beat, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated column American Life in Poetry, on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, and elsewhere. He has published four full volumes—Eagle & Phenix (2019), Gravel and Hawk (2012, winner of the Hollis Summers Prize), A Palace for the Heart (2004), and The Soft Blare (2003)—and two limited edition books—Text (2016) and Wrestle (2007)—in collaboration with the artist and master printer Erika Adams. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an International Merit Award in Poetry from Atlanta Review, a residency at the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming, both a Tennessee Williams Scholarship and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, twice been a finalist for the Vassar Miller Prize, once each a semifinalist for the Verse Prize and the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, and a finalist in both the Morton Marr Poetry Contest and the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry. His poem “powerhouse” was permanently installed in twelve-inch Corten steel on the Columbus RiverWalk as a public art piece by sculptor Mike McFalls in 2016.

Nick is a professor of creative writing at Columbus State University and directs the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia, and Nyack, New York.