Waves and Bones, a project sponsored by the Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding National Beauty Partnership, will be launched at Newcastle poetry festival at the beginning of May.

A group of poets visited sites on the Northumberland coast to gain inspiration from relics and stories of pilgrimage. The resulting video and photography collage created by artist Phyllis Christopher includes readings of the poems by Linda Anderson, John Challis, Christy Ducker, Linda France, Cynthia Fuller, Kris Johnson, Peter Hebden, Lisa Matthews, Theresa Muñoz and David Spittle.

Newcastle poetry festival will have the theme of crossings and borders, and its programme was launched on Thursday 15 March by the Scottish makar Jackie Kay at the Mining Institute, Newcastle, where she also read from her latest book Bantam (2017).

Another highlight will be a collaboration with the major retrospective of Newcastle University graduate Sean Scully, co-hosted by the Hatton and Laing Galleries (February – May 2018). Eight poets - Ian Duhig, Luke Kennard, Sean O’Brien, Sasha Dugdale, Imtiaz Dharker, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Sasha Dugdale and Degna Stone - have created new works inspired by Scully’s paintings. A reading of some of these new poems will take place during the festival, on Friday 4 May.

The festival gets under way on Wednesday 2 May, at Newcastle University’s Boiler House, with an event featuring Jorie Graham, the first of several US poets, including Patricia Smith, Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky and Fanny Howe who will be performing during the festival. More details