The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment.
MALIKA BOOKER is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her pamphlet Breadfruit was published by flipped eye in 2007, and her first collection, Pepper Seed, published in 2013 by Peepal Tree, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. She has written for the stage and radio, and was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is currently a Douglas Caster Fellow at the University of Leeds.
SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000 and currently teaches at New York University. She has been involved with outreach writing workshops at hospitals for the physically challenged and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her collection Stag’s Leap won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize; her latest, Odes, was published by Cape Poetry in 2016.
WARSAN SHIRE is a Somali-British poet. Her pamphlets are Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Her Blue Body (2015). In 2013 she won the first Brunel University African Poetry Prize. She was made the inaugural Young Poet Laureate for London in 2014 and served as Poet in Residence for Queensland, Australia, in 2014. In 2016 she collaborated with Beyoncé Knowles Carter on the film adaptation and poetry of the visual album Lemonade. Her work has been translated into several languages. Her debut collection is forthcoming from flipped eye publishing.