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KEITH ARMSTRONG
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Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he has worked as a
community development worker, poet, librarian and publisher,
Doctor 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 is coordinator of the
Northern Voices Community Projects creative writing and
community publishing enterprise and 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.
He was Year of the Artist 2000 poet-in-residence at Hexham
Races, working with artist Kathleen Sisterson. He has also
written for music-theatre productions, including ‘Fire &
Brimstone’ (on painter John Martin), 1989, and ‘The Hexham
Celebration’, 1992, both for the Hexham Abbey Festival. He
appeared again at the Hexham Abbey Festival in 2008 reciting the
poetry of Hexham poet Wilfrid Gibson.
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
(2011) and The Month of the Asparagus (2011), 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 Britain.
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.
He has read several
times in Limerick and in Cork, Dublin, Kinvara, Fermoy and
Galway. His irish adventures have inspired him to write a
sequence of poems based on the places he has visited and the
people he has met. With Dominic Taylor, he co-edited the
anthology ‘Two Rivers Meet, poetry from the Shannon and the
Tyne’ which was published by Revival Press as part of the
exchange between Limerick and Keith’s home city.
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