Dianne Darby is a poet and fiction writer whose first collection, Perfect Legs, a combination of poetry and short stories, was published in 1995. She’s since been published in a variety of magazines and journals both at home and in America, and has run many writing workshops in both poetry and prose, most recently playing an important role in The Opening Line, the Yorkshire-wide writer development project run by The Word Hoard in partnership with Yorkshire Art Circus. In Autumn 1997 she gave 7 performances in the Festival of English Arts in Land Brandenburg, Germany, and in 1998 her story King Prawns was included in the Yorkshire Art Circus anthology, Tubthumping. In 2000, she was writer-in-residence at the City Voice Festival in Leeds.

read Dianne Darby's autumn invents

Keith Jafrate is a writer and musician who has performed throughout England, and in Canada, the USA, France, Germany and the Czech Republic. As a poet, he has 8 publications to his name, the most recent being Some Anger from Spout Publications. He has also written fiction and for the theatre, and composed music for plays for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. His first large-scale musical work was the quintet piece Timeless Postcard, commissioned by Bedford Readers and Writers Festival in 1993, followed by a series of songs for octet, Songs for Eurydice, commissioned by Jazz Action in 1995. In 1998, he completed a Photo98 commission in collaboration with photographer Paula Summerley and choreographer Charlotte Vincent. The resulting text-image book, body:ink, was published in autumn 1998. He was commissioned by The Folly Gallery, Lancaster, to create the text-image installation neither created nor destroyed for Lancaster’s first Digital Arts Festival in autumn 2000, and was writer-in-residence at The Prince of Wales Hospice in Pontefract from 1999 to 2001. He currently edits the text

read a section from Keith Jafrate's letter from home