Poets Inc

Gav Cross is a storyteller that gets away with shouting at families and grown-ups for a living.

Often found lurking around the worst corners of a Ghost Story, Nursery Rhyme or Fairy Tale, Gav assures you that the tears of his audience are usually from laughter and not terror.

Usually.

Maria Ferguson is a writer and performer. Her poetry has been widely anthologised and published in literary magazines such as Magma, The Rialto, The North and The Poetry Review. She was a finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2024 and her debut collection, Alright, Girl? (Burning Eye, 2020), was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes. On the stage, her one-woman show Fat Girls Don’t Dance (Oberon, 2017) won the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show; Essex Girl (Oberon, 2019) was shortlisted for the Tony Craze Award and won Show of the Week at VAULT Festival. She has been commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts, Stylist magazine, The Bronte Parsonage and BBC Radio. Her work has been featured in The Guardian and on Radio 4’s The Verb and Woman’s Hour. She is the Associate Producer of LIVEwire Poetry and teaches creative writing in a variety of settings. Her second poetry collection, Swell was published in 2025 by Penguin Random House.