Shannon Nolan is a wife and mother of two from London. She is a former actress from an ethnic minority background, Irish and Romany Travelling community. Shannon has managed to stick it out through education and training, both acting and writing being her main passions, providing her many opportunities to give back to other Travelling girls.
Ildiko Nova is a local multi-disciplinary artist. Her artistic background includes various mediums and experiences from painting to design. She loves to paint portraits, city scenes and animals. Her illustration work is about storytelling and juxtaposition, she enjoys putting elements together that are unusual or unexpected. She asks questions about the growing urban setting and its effects. Trained as a community worker, her activism includes giving voice to the lives of underprivileged people and addressing societal issues. In the last decade she successfully learned digital design and beaded embroidery. Her work is published worldwide, she has achieved several awards.
Lavie Olupona is an Irish Traveller-Nigerian spoken word poet from Cork, Ireland who is often found annotating a secondhand book with a hot chocolate. In 2022, Lavie was invited to the Dáil to share her poem 'Let our Voices be heard'. To date, she was selected along with 14 other teenage writers, for the Edna O'Brien Bursary (Young Writers Award), performed at Misleór (Festival of Nomadic Cultures), Many Tongues of Cork, Africa Day Cork and the Outsiders Club ‘Let the Pen Speak’ events. She likes to write about her rich heritage, issues facing young people today and (slightly exaggerated) romance.
Julie O’Leary is an Irish Traveller writer. She is from a long heritage of old Irish storytellers. She comes from Westmeath in the heart of Ireland. She has worked with Maynooth College as a guest speaker on her current novel. She has been recognised by the Arts Council of Ireland as a suitable candidate for peer panel reviews. She was awarded the Tyron Guthrie Centre Bursary Award by the Irish Writers Centre. She was published in the Traveller Times in 2019. She is hoping to publish her novel in the near future.
Mary Foley Olupona is a West Cork, Irish Traveller native who holds a Bachelor’s degree. Since a young age she has had a passion for poetry. She is the mother of four ‘forevermore’ and spends her days writing poetry about injustice, spending time with her kids and dog. She is an active member and worker at the West Cork Traveller Centre and loves working with people.
Rosemary Omar lives in Christchurch, New Zealand with her husband and one son. She originally trained as a registered nurse. But loves to write. She has had a short story published in a New Zealand Anthology of short stories. She has Romany ancestry, on both sides of my family, related to some well known families. Her paternal grandmother was Romany, migrating to NZ where she kept her ethnicity secret due to prejudice. Her mother's family was very open, and practiced many Romany customs, such as reading palms, tea leaves and cards. She met and married her husband, Rashid, in Singapore, they had four children, two daughters and two sons. Their oldest son Tariq was particularly keen on exploring his Romany ancestry when he was murdered in a white supremacist terrorist act on March 15, 2019. He was twenty-four years old. She was in the middle of the shooting outside. The poem represents Tariq on that day. She is blessed to have three surviving children, a son-in-law and two grandchildren.
Chris Penfold is English Gypsy (Romanichal). She was brought up in Wiltshire and the Forest of Dean. After having four children she began writing her father’s life story and Romani poems which she read on Jake Bowers’ Rokker Radio show. She continued writing and her work has been published in various magazines. She continues to be passionate about the Romani language. In April 2024 she was awarded the Susan Alexander Lifetime Achievement Award at the Friends, Families & Travellers Awards.
Delia Pring M.A. has Romanichal English Gypsy, and Irish Traveller heritage. She is creatively active and her poetry and has been published in multiple journals. Her first collection of creative non-fiction Making Marks: Musings of a Curious Mind was published in 2022. Delia is currently working on a collection exploring her hometown and how it has influenced her travel, creative practice and her need for a nomadic lifestyle.
Ella Shaw is from North Yorkshire, living in Italy. Her mother came from Romany Shaws and her father from Harris Romanies. Her great granny was born and raised in a vardo. She is a poet and painter. She has travelled many countries including Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Austria and France. Her earliest memories are in caravans and seeing deer and foxes out of the window. She comes from a big family. She always had many cousins to play with as a child in Cumbria where they all met as one big family to spend the springs and summers in their caravans by the sea and mountains. They still go there, it’s their atchin tan. She has always been inspired to write poetry because of her travels and what she has seen and experienced. She has published a book called A Million Eyes under the penname Ella May Sophia. She is currently working on a new publication and continues to write almost daily.
Candy Sheridan was born in Bristol, educated by the Sisters of Mercy. Her family moved every year or so. From Bristol, to Europe, through Africa, back to Ireland, London and now Norfolk. People always query her accent, ask where she is from. She is from nowhere, from the M4 that the Irish Travellers, like her father, built. Hers is a free-range family, scattered across Ireland, the American west coast and Australia. Her name remains her passport, identity and heritage. She is not a writer, she is a storyteller. She was the child who sat with the adults, soaked up the stories about animals in the old farmer's house, the banshee, the wakes, who fell out with who, the old ways entered her heart at a young age. She found her writing self in her shop where she stopped and settled. She heard people's stories and then began to write my own.
Jess Smith, at the ripe age of 50, took a leap of faith, to write about her life on the road, living in a bus with seven sisters, loving parents and her jugal, Tiny. Would she find a publisher? And how much interest would there be in her Travelling culture? Three autobiographical books, one of tales, a novel and a book of facts around the culture, have taken her on a wonderful journey around the world.
Paulina Stevens grew up in an insular Romani American family and is the subject of Foretold, a podcast produced by the LA Times. She owns a holistic healing store, Romanic Holistic in California. Together, Jezmina (aka Jessica Reidy) and Paulina co-host Romanistan, a podcast celebrating Romani culture.
Jezmina Von Thiele (they/she) is a writer, editor, educator, podcaster, and fortune teller. They write poetry, fiction, & nonfiction published in Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review Online, Narrative Magazine, & elsewhere, and some of this work is published under Jessica Reidy. Jezmina reads tarot, palms, and tea leaves in their Romani family’s tradition, both online, and in-person. Jezmina specialises in teaching creativity, art, writing, and literature workshops; divination; and other spiritual topics. Jezmina also tells fortunes and performs with The Poetry Brothel—Boston. They are co-host of Romanistan, a podcast celebrating Romani culture, alongside co-host Paulina Stevens. Jezmina and Paulina authored their debut book, Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling. They are also owner and operator of the online vintage Etsy shop, Evil Eye Edit.
Chrissie Donoghue Ward is writer and human rights activist for more than 40 years. Most of her work has been trying to get better rights for Travellers. She speaks at events related to this as she is very passionate about this subject. As a result of doors being shut in her face around Travellers rights she began to write poems and short stories despite being illiterate. She taught herself to read and write watching her children do their homework. She’s had poetry published and is currently working on a children’s book for settled children to learn about Traveller children and for Traveller children to see something on a book shelf they can relate to.
Winnie Ward is a thirty-five years old Irish Traveller from Sligo. She grew up there with her parents and six siblings. When she was eight years old the family moved to Newbridge, Co. Kildare where they lived for the next five years. When she was thirteen they moved back to Sligo and settled there. She left the family home in 2017 when she married a Roscommon man, however the marriage was cut short after one month due the abusive nature of the marriage. After six months back in the family home she moved out and began living on her own. She ended up on the wrong side of the law and went to prison in 2018 for ten months. In prison, she started writing poetry out of boredom but it soon turned into a hobby and now it's a passion. She is hoping to get a book of her poetry published someday soon.
Claire Wimbush works as an International Tracing Service Archive Researcher at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London. Claire’s poetry has been published in the Erbacce Press and Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology (Butcher’s Dog, 2021). Claire was shortlisted for the Emerging Writers Award in 2022 and awarded the bursary position on Imogen Hermes-Gowers ‘Writing the Past’ course in the same year. Her first love is prose and she is always in the middle of writing too many novels and short stories.
Sarah Wimbush is a Yorkshire poet. Her collection STRIKE (Stairwell, 2024) was shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her first collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, was published with Bloodaxe in 2022. She is the author of prize-winning pamphlets: The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith/Doorstop, 2021) and Bloodlines (Seren, 2020). Her poetry has been included in Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology (Butcher’s Dog, 2021) and most recently appeared in PN Review, the Morning Star and Poetry Wales. She is the recipient of awards from the Society of Authors and New Writing North and co-edited The Poetry Business anthology, COAL (Smith/Doorstop, 2024).
Cecilia Woloch is the author of a novel and six collections of poems, most recently an expanded and updated edition of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, which has been given multi-lingual, multi-media performances in Los Angeles, Paris, Warsaw, Athens and elsewhere; a poem from the new edition was also included in a memorial exhibit at Auschwitz -Birkenau in 2021. Her honours include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, CEC/ArtsLink International and the Center for International Theatre Development. Her work has been published in translation in French, German, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Romanes. She collaborates regularly with musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors, and filmmakers. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in rural Kentucky, she has travelled the world as a poet, writer, teacher and performer.
Vanessa Wood-Davies’ Gypsy heritage comes from the family of Abram Wood, who is her five times great grandfather, and John Roberts, Telynor Cymru, who is her three times great grandfather. Her grandfather William was the last in their line to live in Wales with the Gypsy family in Newtown. She lives in Norfolk, but spends time in Wales in her caravan regularly. She spent most of her working life working with horses, and has three of her own. She plays the harp, writes tunes, makes jewellery, draws and generally creates things. She’s even designed and built two harps and hopes to make more.
