The Poetry Extension. Bringing poets and dancers together from around the world, one face-melting gig at a time. Our fourth event is online-only, and FREE. Join us here from 8 a.m. Toronto time (EST) and 1 p.m. UK time (GMT) on Thursday March 30th, 2017 for live streaming of the event. We welcome all the megawatt poets below. (Photo courtesy modernmechanix.com)

Natalya Anderson is a writer and former ballet dancer from Toronto, Canada. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and a Bachelor of Journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto.

She won the 2014 Bridport Prize for her poem, 'Clear Recent History', and the poem was highly commended at the 2015 Forward Prizes. Natalya was also one of four finalists for the 2015 Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize for her poem, 'Dance Therapy'. Her poetry and feature writing has appeared in Poetry London, Prac Crit, The Moth, The Forward Book of Poetry 2016, and other fine publications. Natalya founded The Poetry Extension in 2015, within which she aims to forge cross-Atlantic relationships between poets and dancers from Canada, Ireland, the UK, and the US through live events.

Join us here from 8 a.m. Toronto time (EST) and 1 p.m. UK time (GMT) on Thursday March 30th, 2017 for live streaming of our fourth event.

Kaddy Benyon is a Granta New Poet and former television scriptwriter. Her first collection, Milk Fever, won the Crashaw Prize, and was published by Salt in 2012. In 2015, she completed a residency at The Polar Museum in Cambridge, where she wrote poems in response to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. In January 2016, Kaddy travelled to the remote Scottish island of Eigg for a residency with The Bothy Project. Whilst living in a hut with little electricity, no phone signal or toilet, Kaddy began to write poems toward her second collection, The Glass Harvest.

Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and teaching artist. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the forthcoming chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams and has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her work has been featured by the Huffington Post and PBS NewsHour, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Poetry Review, the Indiana Review, and elsewhere.

Rebecca Goss's second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House), was shortlisted for The 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, The Warwick Prize for Writing 2015 and The Portico Prize for Literature 2015.

Daisy Lafarge grew up in the South of England and currently lives in Glasgow, where she is pursuing a PhD. Her work has appeared in publications such as Poetry London, Tender, the White Review (online), The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded first prize in the Poetry Book Society National Student Poetry Competition 2015 and is currently at work on a novel.

Kathryn Mockler is a writer, screenwriter, and poet. She is the author of the poetry books The Purpose Pitch (Mansfield Press, 2015), The Saddest Place on Earth (DC Books, 2012) and Onion Man (Tightrope Books, 2011). Her writing has been published in Public Pool, The Butter, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Lemon Hound, and Geist. Currently, she is the Toronto Editor of Joyland and Publisher of The Rusty Toque.

Soraya Peerbaye’s Tell: Poems for a Girlhood (Pedlar Press, 2015),was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her first collection, Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (Goose Lane Editions, 2009) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award.

Pascale Petit was born in Paris and lives in Cornwall. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica, is published by Bloodaxe in September 2017. Her sixth, Fauverie (Seren, 2014), was her fourth to be shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and five poems from the book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. Petit has had three collections chosen as Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, the Independent and the Observer. She has travelled extensively, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon, and her books have been translated in Mexico, China, Serbia and France. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a visual artist.