Editorial Team

Dream Catcher receives literally thousands of submissions every year. To get a good balance of voices and tastes represented, selection of candidate poems and stories for the magazine is conducted by a team of editors, two of whom must like a piece for it to be considered for publication.The board comprises poets and writers of different styles and backgrounds who ensure that the magazine appeals to a wide range of readers and that Dream Catcher is an exemplar of the best in poetry and short prose.

Editor: Edwin Stockdale (from Issue 54)

Editor Emeritus and Founder: Paul Sutherland

Editorial Board

John Gilham (former editor)

Art Advisor: Greg McGee

Paul Sutherland founded Dream Catcher in 1996 and has developed a wide ging readership for the journal. Paul has edited a number of anthologies and is the author of eight collections of poetry and in 2012 he published his eighth collection, Journeying.Paul turned freelance in 2004. He has won or been runner up in a number of national poetry competitions

Edwin Stockdale was the first person to be awarded a PhD in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Leeds Trinity University. He also has an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from the University of Birmingham. Widely published in the UK, his work includes two pamphlets with Red Squirrel Press: Aventurine (2014) and The Glower of the Sun (2019). His debut full collection, Winter Wolf, about the bisexual medieval monarch Edward II is forthcoming from Red Squirrel Press in March 2026 and the research and writing of it was funded by Arts Council England through the Developing Your Creative Practice fund. He was the co-editor, with Dr Amina Alyal, of An Insubstantial Universe (Yaffle Press 2020), with Dr Hannah-Freya Blake, Sleeping in Frozen Quiet (IDP 2023), and, with Tanya Nightingale and Professor Oz Hardwick, Before the Party (IDP 2025). Scholarly research articles on his practice-based research have appeared in Writing in Practice and in two book chapters for Routledge: Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (2022) and Ekphrastic Approaches in Twenty-First Century Poetry: Writing Out (2026). He has articles forthcoming in New Writing and Life Writing. At the time of writing, he is Research Fellow at the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies and Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. From September 2025 he will be studying for an MA in Creative Non-Fiction at the University of East Anglia.

Hannah Stone is well known to Stairwell, who published her as one of Eight Medievalist Poets in New Crops from Old Fields (ed. Oz Hardwick) in 2015, followed by her first full length collection, Lodestone, 2016. She has since published Missing Miles, which won the Geoffrey Stevens Memorial Prize for Indigo Dream Publishing in 2017, and Swn y Morloi, the inaugural pamphlet with Marsden-based poetry house Maytree Press in 2019. she has also published the fruits of collaborations with other poets focusing on issues of defining the feminine, including An After Dinner’s Sleep (2015), Holding up Half the Sky (2019) and Fit to Bust (2020). She has edited three volumes of poetry responding to the theme of women engineers, has multiple collaborations with composer Matt Oglesby, and is represented in Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (ed Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick, 2022).
Hannah co-edited the poetry ezine Algebra of Owls, convenes the monthly ‘Nowt but Verse’ conversation for the Leeds Library, comperes Wordspace open mic, and has contributed to literature festivals in Yorkshire and beyond. She convenes the Poets Composers forum for the international Leeds Lieder Festival and is poet -theologian in residence for the Leeds Church Institute, her weekly blogs using poetry to reflect on lockdown being published as Reflections (2021).

Amina Alyal has published two collections of poetry (The Ordinariness of Parrots, Stairwell Books 2015 and Seasons of Myth, Indigo Dreams 2016), besides collaborative work with Oz Hardwick and two edited collections of academic essays, and is widely published in journals. She regularly performs poetry and music shows, previously with the Taiko drumming group Kaminari UK, currently with Oz Hardwick and Karl Baxter.  Amina is Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University: she specializes in Renaissance Literature, particularly poetry and drama and writes and researches on Gothic horror and fairy tale.

John Gilham has been widely published and has been included in previous issues of Dream Catcher. A visit to the area of the Ypres Salient, where his grandfather served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in WWI has strengthened the already fierce anti-war stance which runs through his work. Although best known close to home for his Fosdyke and Me stories he is more widely known for his well crafted poetry and observations on life, cycling, and riding the railways. John’s most recent publications are Learning to Breathe and Where the Hares Are.

Rose Drew is a performance poet and anthropologist. She has edited a number of anthologies including the successful Green Man Awakes and her own book, Temporary Safety made the top ten Purple Patch Individual Collections of 2011. Rose has been widely published both in the UK and the USA. She is a political poet, and is sensitive to the injustices a nation heaps upon its own purely in the interests of winning and maintaining power. Rose is the joint Poet Lauriate for the York Medieval Mystery Plays 2026.

Tanya Parker Nightingale is a poet of exquisite delicacy, well known to Dream Catcher readers as a reviewer, but who has also been selected by Paul for publication. She won the Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition with her poem Eve which also featured in the International Women’s week show A Question of Power. In 2011, with Rose Drew, Tanya performed their two woman show She’s the Cultured One at the Edinburgh Fringe and other festivals.

Alan Gillott has been published over a period of many years initially under the aegis of Alasdair Aston and the Dulwich Poetry Society, and more recently in North America. He has edited a number of anthologies for Stairwell Books and his most recent collections, Beyond the Window and Except we Teach have garnered  critical acclaim. Alan’s interest is in the structure of free form poems and he works with poets to help them make structure a tool for a more effective communication. Alan is the joint Poet Lauriate for the York Medieval Mystery Plays 2026.

Greg McGee is Co-owner of York's city centre white cube 'According to McGee'. He is fiercely passionate about art and its process; its inception; its execution and its exhibition. Being exposed to great art and carefully harnessing the skills in producing one's own art is all part of living a fulfilling and constantly improving life. Contemporary art and poetry are, according to Greg, 'the cosiest of possible bedfellows'

Joe Williams is a writer and performing poet from Leeds. His latest book is 'The Taking Part', a short collection of poems on the theme of sport and games, published by Maytree Press. His other work includes the pamphlet ‘This is Virus’, a sequence of erasure poems made from Boris Johnson’s letter to the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the verse novella 'An Otley Run', which was shortlisted in the Best Novella category at the 2019 Saboteur Awards. Despite all of that, he is probably most widely read thanks to his contributions to Viz.

Mia Lofthouse is a Leeds based writer in their early twenties. They have a Bachelors degree in English and Creative Writing from Leeds Trinity University and are currently studying for a Masters in Creative Writing at the same institution. Mia is autistic and non-binary and their preferred pronouns are they/she. They have had multiple short stories published in various literary magazines but their true passion lies in novel writing, which they have been doing obsessively since the age of fourteen. They can usually be found writing in a quiet corner of a Waterstones’ cafe or virtually, on instagram, as ‘mia_should_be_writing’.

Pauline Kirk is the editor and publisher for Fighting Cock Press. Pauline is the author of two novels, Waters of Time and The Keepers, and is part of a collaboration with her daughter who together publish as P.J. Quinn. She has a number of anthologies to her name, the most recent of which is Envying the Wild edited by the late Mabel Ferrett. Pauline’s poems, short stories and articles have appeared in a wide range of journals.

Laura Strickland is a carer and MA student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include The North, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dream Catcher, Northern Gravy, Strix, The Frogmore Papers and Butcher’s Dog. She is one of 20 poets included in Poetry Archive's Worldview 2023; highly commended in Nine Arches Primers and was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2023.