Experimental Canadian poets Steve McCaffery and Karen MacCormack are appearing in an Other Room event at 6pm at the Tiled Hall, Leeds Art Gallery on Tuesday 7 June. The following night, Wednesday 8 June, both poets appear at the Old Abbey Inn, Manchester.  This one's at 7 pm. Both events are free, but tickets should be booked in advance.

Steve McCaffery,  holder of the David Gray chair of poetry and letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was born in Sheffield in 1947 and grew up in Barnsley before moving to Toronto in 1968, where he became a member of the legendary sound-poetry group The Four Horsemen.

 Karen MacCormack, pictured, was born in Zambia and holds dual Canadian and British citizenship. A key figure in Canadian poetry, Mac Cormack’s “polybiography” Implexures traces aspects of her English ancestry whilst opening up to the worlds of history and science.
 
Also appearing in Leeds are Alan Halsey, who ran the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979 to 1997. He continues to work as a specialist bookseller in Sheffield and co-edits West House Books with Geraldine Monk. Halsey produces text-graphics as well as poetry and has published collaborative works with both MacCormack and McCaffery.
 
Geraldine Monk was born in Blackburn and has lived in Sheffield since 1984. During the 1970s she lived in Leeds where she came into contact with the poet and painter Jeff Nuttall who admired and encouraged her work. The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk, edited by Scott Thurston and with a foreword by Nuttall was published in 2007.