Harriet Tarlo was born in Worcester in 1968. She studied at the University of Durham for several years, receiving her BA in 1989 and her PhD (on the American poet, H.D.) in 1995. Her academic writing focuses on modernist and contemporary poetry with particular interest in linguistic experimentation, gender and landscape/environment. She now teaches English and Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She lives with her partner and two children near Holmfirth, having lived in West Yorkshire since the mid-nineties. She spent most of the previous decade in County Durham, and is also a frequent visitor to the North Cornish coast. Her poetry engages as closely as it can with these places, not in an attempt to represent them, but to embody the sound and rhythm of human relationships with the outside.