For many years now the professional "creative writer" within universities and other institutions has encompassed a range of roles, embracing a plurality of scholarly and creative identities. The often complex relation between those identities forms the broad focus of this book, which also examines various, and variously fraught, dialogues between creative writers, "hybrid" writers and academic colleagues from other subjects within single institutions, and with the public and the media. At the heart of the book is the principle of "creative writing" as a fully-fledged discipline, an important subject for debate at a time when the future of the humanities is in crisis; the contributors, all writers and teachers themselves, provide first-hand views on crucial questions: What are the most fruitful intersections between creative writing and scholarship? What methodological overlaps exist between creative writing and literary studies, and what can each side of the "divide" learn from its counterpart? Equally, from a pedagogical perspective, what kind of writing should be taught to students to ensure that the discipline remains relevant? And is the writing workshop still the best way of teaching creative writing? The essays here tackle these points from a range of perspectives, including close readings, historical contextualisation and theoretical exploration. Professor Richard Marggraf Turley teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University.BR Contributors: Richard Marggraf Turley, Damian Walford Davies, Philip Gross, Peter Barry, Kevin Mills, Tiffany Atkinson, Robert Sheppard, Deryn Rees-Jones, Zoe Skoulding, Jasmine Donahaye

How might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love? Tiffany Atkinson's fourth collection includes the prize-winning sequence 'Dolorimeter', which takes fragments of speech and found text from a hospital residency to pay homage to the inventiveness and humour of patients and staff in a series of meditations on the notion that pain resists language. Away from the wards, other poems consider the strangeness of the workplace and the embarrassing incursions of desire into everyday life, celebrating the ability of poetic language to lay awkwardness and uncertainty alongside unexpected openings and glimpses of revelation. A lumen is a unit of light, but also a channel or an opening inside the body; perhaps, in this collection, it may also serve as a metaphor for the work of the poem itself. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

"Catulla et al" summons up the sensual and scandalous spirit of the Latin poet Catullus - his lyricism, diatribe and bawdy - by turns wrenching, cynical and outrageous. But whereas the Roman love chronicler is a young man about town, Tiffany Atkinson's Catulla is a free-thinking female confronting modern mores with both ambivalence and uneasy embarrassment. The Catulla poems in her second book show a shift away from the loosely confessional or straightforwardly narrative poems of her first collection, "Kink and Particle", towards a more explicit playfulness with stories. Other poems try to keep one foot in a recognisable real worldA" while still bending it out of shape with strange plot twists, elements of folk tale or myth, and philosophical musings. Catulla et al was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year).