Paul Mills

Paul Mills has published six poetry collections, the latest Nomad from Smokestack Books (2021). He is the author of two books on creative writing: Writing in Action (Routledge, 1996) and The Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook (2005). Paul’s fourth collection Dinosaur Point was the overall winner of the Smith Doorstop book and pamphlet competition in 1999. He has also written two verse dramas, performed at the National Theatre and West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Paul was an Arts Council writing fellow at Manchester University, and Southern Arts Fellow at Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham. He was Gregory Fellow in poetry at Leeds University from 1978 to 1980, and then for many years taught literature and creative writing at York St John University. In 1986–7 Paul and his family lived in California where he held a Fulbright teaching exchange fellowship. Many of his poems reflect his experience of travelling in North America and recently in Peru.

In collaboration with Yorkshire Film Archive, his latest work You Should’ve Seen Us is a series of poems presented as voiceovers to accompany archive films. Smith Doorstop published the poems in 2012, and the poem-films were recently shown at Bridlington, Sheffield, Lancaster and Ilkley literature festivals. Paul’s interests include drawing and painting, and research into palaeo-anthropology and human origins. While at York he has begun to write a book of poems centred around this subject, and is benefiting from the expertise of the archaeology department at the university. He has two children and a grandson. He lives in Ripon.