Candlestick Press – 'Instead of a card' poetry pamphlets | UK based independent publisher

Candlestick Press

Biographies

Here you can find out more about the huge range of poets we feature in our pamphlets and the artists whose work appears on our beautiful covers.

We’ve now published poems by over 850 historical and contemporary poets. In our pages you’ll find old favourites alongside twenty-first century voices – everyone from WH Auden to Belinda Zhawi. Although our emphasis is on British poetry, you’ll also find Irish, American and Australian writers. We hope these pages will encourage you to explore further the work of a poet you’ve enjoyed in one of our pamphlets.

  • Carla Sofia Ferreira

    Carla Sofia Ferreira is an American poet and teacher from Newark, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in a large number of journals and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection is A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us (River River Books, 2024).

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  • Mahendra Solanki

    Mahendra Solanki is a poet, editor and Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. He was born in Nairobi, moving to the UK as a child, and his poetry often draws on this background. His first collection was Shadows of My Making (1986) and his most recent is The Lies We Tell (2014). He has worked as poet-in-residence in a secure prison and for First Story at the Nottingham Children’s Hospital.

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  • Johnnie Sparkle

    Johnnie Sparkle is a retired mental health nurse, public health worker and jazz loving anagram from the West Midlands. He took up writing poetry following retirement and likes dogs, cats, trees, water and the sound of other people. He is grateful to the NHS for giving him a job and saving his life twice. So far.

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  • Roberta Spear

    Roberta Spear (1948 – 2003) was an American poet.  She grew up in California and published three collections of poetry. A posthumous collection of her work A Sweetness Rising: New and Selected Poems (2007) was edited by Philip Levine who highlighted her relish for using her poems to tell exotic stories about imaginary characters.

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  • Martha Sprackland

    Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Citadel (Pavilion, 2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award; a new collection is forthcoming in 2027. Martha teaches for Arvon, where she is also a Trustee. Her new translation of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross, Dark Night: Poems and Selected Prose, was published by Penguin Classics in 2026.

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  • AE Stallings

    AE Stallings is an American poet who is the current Oxford Professor of Poetry. She has published four full collections, the most recent of which Like was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also published several verse translations.  A Selected Poems This Afterlife was published by Carcanet in 2022.

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