As part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind (20-30 September 2012), Longbarrow Press has co-curated two new works that engage with ideas of nature and place. Call & Response (conceived by the artist Paul Evans and co-curated with Brian Lewis) will bring together haiku poems by 10 writers – Angelina Ayers, Matthew Clegg, Abigail Flint, Mark Goodwin, Rob Hindle, Chris Jones, Fay Musselwhite, Mary Marken, Andrew Myers and Ruth Palmer – inspired by the mystery of bird calls and songs. Each day from 20-30 September 2012 we will be posting two new haiku on Twitter (@Callhaiku). Recordings of the poets reading each haiku will be simultaneously uploaded to our SoundCloud site. Over the course of 10 days this will build into a cumulative dawn chorus of surprising lyrical invention and beauty. Call & Response is one of a series of creative collaborations between Paul Evans and Professor Tim Birkhead devised for Festival of the Mind: visit Evans’ Animal Magic site to find out more about the project.

We are also pleased to announce that Matthew Clegg will be leading a poetry walk around Sheffield’s canal basin during Festival of the Mind, reading poems from his sequence The Navigators (which explores the canals of South Yorkshire and their histories). A Navigation with Matthew Clegg will take place on Sunday 23 September at 2pm, departing from the Festival’s Arrivals Zone kiosk outside Sheffield Railway Station (opposite the main entrance). Please note that this event is now fully booked. To find out more about the Arrivals Zone programme, click here.

Finally, we’ve created a new History page to illustrate the development of Longbarrow Press – through events, collaborations and publications – since its launch in 2006. A number of (hitherto unseen) archive photographs and useful links have been added to the timeline: more will be uploaded in the near future. Many thanks to Nikki Clayton for her contributions to the photographic archive.