About Smokestack Books
Smokestack is an independent publisher of radical and unconventional poetry run by Andy Croft. He lives in Middlesbrough, where he has been active for many years in community writing projects. Writing Residencies include the Hartlepool Headland, the Great North Run, the Southwell Poetry Festival, the Combe Down Stone Mines Project, HMP Holme House and HMP Moorland. His verse–play about the history of Middlesbrough, Smoke! was shown at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
His books include Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, Holme and Away, Comrade Heart and After the Party (forthcoming). He has written five novels and forty-two books for teenagers, mostly about football.
His books of poetry include Nowhere Special, Gaps Between Hills (with Mark Robinson), Headland, Just as Blue, Great North, Comrade Laughter, Ghost Writer, Sticky, Three Men on the Metro (with W.N. Herbert and Paul Summers), Nineteen Forty-eight (with Martin Rowson, forthcoming) and five edited anthologies, Red Sky at Night (with Adrian Mitchell), North by North East (with Cynthia Fuller), Not Just a Game (with Sue Dymoke), The Night Shift (with Michael Baron and Jenny Swann) and Speaking English: Poems for John Lucas. He has given many poetry readings, including in Potsdam, Sofia, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, New York and London's Poetry International. He writes a regular poetry column for the Morning Star.
