After a career in academia, Valerie Bence finished a doctorate in her mid-fifties and then moved from academic to creative writing, completing an MA in Poetry in 2016. She works mainly with objects and artworks but writes ekphrastic poems in its broadest sense, encompassing truth, memory, place and time. Time is an especially powerful focus and she finds that writing on significant anniversaries or in real-time brings another dimension to the writing process.

Her first collection Falling in love with a dead man (based on Rembrandt artworks) is to be published in 2019. Valerie lives and works in Bucks.

Valerie’s poem, Light is in An Outbreak of Peace

Valerie’s poem for Time and Time, Solstice Shorts Festival 2019, Arrival, will be performed at Clydebank, Greenwich, Hastings, Lisbon and Maryport and published in the Time and Tide anthology.