Clare Crossman
A poet with a background in theatre, collaborations with an illustrator and a songwriter, and practical and creative engagements with local landscapes and nature.
Clare Crossman began writing in the theatre in the North of England where she wrote and directed for youth, community, and Theatre in Education for Prism Arts and the Dukes Playhouse, Lancaster.
Growing up in north Cumbria, she returned to live there in 1989 after the early death of her father. The wildness and beauty of the north Pennine Landscape where she walked gave her space, silence and time to write and finish the poems she had kept in notebooks. She became a member of The New Lake Poets in Keswick. In 1996 her pamphlet Landscapes won the Redbeck competition.
Since then she has published four collections of poetry and a CD, Fen Song: A Ballad of the Fen, with singer-songwriter Penni McLaren Walker. This was toured with Creative Arts East. Her poems have been widely anthologised.
Recently the illustrator Victor M Ibanez produced a series of 10 prints in response to a sequence of poems about climate change. She has been involved in conserving a local woodland for the last 18 years. Belief in the essential importance of the natural world is part of her life as a person and a writer. With her husband, Iain Mcphee, she has lived in Cambridgeshire since 2000.
An Invitation to Act: Letters to the Earth
Naturalist
In the Blackthorn Time