Acknowledgements

The Poetry Society is deeply grateful to everyone who helped make About Us a success. Our especial thanks go to UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, whose generous R&D process generated the blue-sky thinking that dreamt this project into being, and from whose continued support we have been lucky to benefit. We have had the privilege of working with two exceptional partners, 59 Productions and Stemettes, whose brilliance, enthusiasm and tenacity gave the project such a strong foundation.

We thank all the many poets who worked on this project: in particular, the poets whose commissioned work appears in this anthology, the team of judges who selected the young winners of the competition, and the poets who delivered workshops in schools across the UK, helping create poems written by primary school children.

We are indebted to all the scientists and creatives who worked on the project: the video designers, production crew, illustrators, sound artists, producers, translators, STEAM role models, PR consultants and many more. In particular, Bla Translation have been an invaluable and reliable source of advice – diolch yn fawr.

Thanks to all the choir members and local residents who sat for living portraits that were so important in bringing the show to life in each location. And thank you to all the local stakeholders from Councils, LCEPs and other networks, who helped recruit schools and poets and were champions for About Us from its inception. Further afield, we are grateful to the British Council for supporting the international aspect of the project.

An enormous and heartfelt thank you to every school, community group, teacher and youth leader who has worked so tirelessly to help bring poetry into your settings.

And, of course, we applaud the enthusiasm and talent of every young person who has taken part in this project: the entrants to, and winners of, the poetry and coding competition, and the young people of Renfrewshire, Derry-Londonderry, Caernarfon, Luton and Hull, who so generously shared their creativity with us.