We are delighted to invite James and Anthony to this FRP Zoom event.
James Sale lives in Bournemouth and is a management consultant, educator and poet who has had over 50 books published, most recently, “Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams” (Routledge, 2021). He has been nominated by The Hong Kong Review for the 2022 Pushcart Prize for poetry, has won first prize in New York’s The Society of Classical Poets 2017 annual competition, and performed in New York in 2019. He is a regular contributor on poetry and culture for New York’s The Epoch Times. His most recent poetry collection is “HellWard”, which has led one reviewer to describe him as “England’s epic poet” and another to describe the poem as like “thriller fiction, especially Lee Child, that has me desperately keen to turn to the next page to see what happens next.” Finally, Anthony Watts remarked that “HellWard is like no other book you have ever read – unless, that is, you’ve read the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, on which it is modelled.”
For more information about the author, and about his Dante project, visit https://englishcantos.home.blog
A Londoner by birth, Anthony Watts has lived in rural Somerset for most of his life, its varying terrains – the Quantock Hills, the Levels – informing much of his work. Upon his retirement from local government in 2003 he held the distinction of being Somerset County Library’s longest-serving member. Anthony is a founder member of the Fire River Poets, at whose monthly open mics he is a regular participant. He has won 26 First Prizes in poetry competitions and was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2014. His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. His first collection, Strange Gold, was published by the mysteriously named KQBX Press, edited by fellow poet James Sale, with whom he will be sharing the guest spot on 2nd June.
