Keith Armstrong Poet

KEITH ARMSTRONG
Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he has worked as a community development worker, poet, librarian and publisher, Keith Armstrong, now resides in the seaside town of Whitley Bay. He has organised several community arts festivals in the region and many literary events. He was founder of Ostrich poetry magazine, Poetry North East, Tyneside Poets and the Strong Words and Durham Voices community publishing series.

He recently compiled and edited books on the Durham Miners’ Gala and on the former mining communities of County Durham, the market town of Hexham and the heritage of North Tyneside. He has been a self-employed writer since 1986 and he was awarded a doctorate in 2007 for his work on Newcastle writer Jack Common at the University of Durham where he received a BA Honours Degree in Sociology in 1995 and Masters Degree in 1998 for his studies on regional culture in the North East of England. His biography of Jack Common was published by the University of Sunderland Press in 2009.

His poetry has been extensively published in magazines such as New Statesman, Poetry Review, Dream Catcher, and Other Poetry, as well as in the collections The Jingling Geordie, Dreaming North, Pains of Class, Imagined Corners, Splinters and The Month of the Asparagus, on cassette, LP & CD, and on radio & TV. He has performed his poetry on several occasions at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and at Festivals in Aberdeen, Bradford, Cardiff, Cheltenham (twice at the Festival of Literature - with Liz Lochhead and with 'Sounds North'), Durham, Newcastle upon Tyne, Greenwich, Lancaster, and throughout the land.

In his youth, he travelled to Paris to seek out the grave of poet Charles Baudelaire and he has been making cultural pilgrimages abroad ever since. He has toured to Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Poland, Iceland (including readings during the Cod War), Denmark, France, Germany (including readings at the Universities of Hamburg, Kiel, Oldenburg, Trier and Tuebingen), Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Czech Republic, The Netherlands, Cuba, Jamaica and Kenya.

TEL. 0191 2529531 FOR BOOKINGS

Keith Armstrong Poet’s tracks

• splinters by Keith Armstrong Poet
• folk song for thomas spence by Keith Armstrong Poet
• tell me lies about northumberland by Keith Armstrong Poet
• old stations by Keith Armstrong Poet
• i will sing of my own newcastle by Keith Armstrong Poet
• everybody's got love bites but me by Keith Armstrong Poet
• sing a song for henshaw by Keith Armstrong Poet
• those humble pie blues by Keith Armstrong Poet
• i love the light in tuebingen by Keith Armstrong Poet
• elephants in tuebingen by Keith Armstrong Poet