Stella Davis was born and brought up in southern England, and educated at Christ’s Hospital and Southampton University. She has been writing poetry since the 1980s, and her work appears widely in magazines including Acumen, Equinox, The Interpreter’s House, iota, The London Magazine, Orbis, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Staple, South Poetry Magazine, and have been heard on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Solent.
 
Stella works successfully with practitioners in other art forms, notably the artist Ben Gough in a collaboration of seascapes and sea poems, and the composers Andrew M. Wilson, Tomasz Mikolajewski, Krisztina Megyeri, and Robert Mingay Smith. Her latest collaboration with Andrew Wilson will be performed in 2023, as part of the Christopher Wren300 celebrations in London and at East Knoyle in Wiltshire (Wren’s birthplace). Her sequence Of Such is the Kingdom, set by Robert Mingay Smith, can be heard online at: Spotify       YouTube       Apple Music/CD Baby
 
Stella spent the Year of the Artist (1999-2000) as Poet in Residence at the Port of Southampton, sponsored by Associated British Ports and the Stevedores’ Co-operative Southampton Container Terminals. Her book of poems arising from the residency, Watershot, was published by Wanda Publications in 2001. In 2003 she was funded by the Arts Council as Poet in Residence at Winchester Cathedral, and her book of poems arising from the residency, St Swithun’s Day, was published by the Friends of Winchester Cathedral in July 2004. Her collection Last Boat to Avalon was published in 2009, the final imprint from Harry Chambers’ Peterloo Poets.
 
Winner of many awards, Stella writes poems on commission (tackling everything from private greetings to a poem in commemoration of Beaulieu Abbey’s 800th anniversary), is registered with The Poetry Society UK as provider of poetry education for adults and children, and describes herself as a jobbing poet.
 
Her latest collection, Lunch on a Green Ledge, was published by Stairwell Books in November 2022.
 
Stella Davis is an incorrigible cyclist, and nowadays many of her poems emerge from bike rides, jotted on scraps of paper by the side of small roads in Somerset and Dorset. She lives with her husband, an academic lawyer (and cyclist), in Somerset, and moonlights as poet in residence at the church of St Mary at Hill in the City of London.
 
Reviews:
 

I don’t often come across a collection of poetry that has me exclaiming ‘Yes!’ at poem after poem, but that was what happened as I read Last Boat to Avalon … there are poems about motherhood, travel, fairy stories, and classical myths. There’s humour, too… Davis’s poems are beautifully written and often very wise. This book deserves readers.

 

Wendy Cope, Mslexia 2009

 
 

Stella Davis writes with an inviting directness (though without undue simplification); this is a poetry which engages with personal memories of the everyday as with the world of myth and fairy-tale, and does so with both humour and an awareness of the “Eden-shining moment”. … Warmly recommended.

 

Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 2010

 
 

She has such sureness, but in these poems she strides more like the wind than an academic being. She is elemental. The poems are both spirit and substance.

 

R.G.Gregory, South Poetry Magazine

 
 

Of Lunch on a Green Ledge:
 

The tug of history steers these poems into view. Poems of this order not only provide an aesthetic pleasure – Stella Davis is rigorous, a precisionist – these personal histories become part of a wider history. Knowing, lyrical, meticulous, delightful these are poems to savour and admire, poems to come back to and read again.

 

Julian Stannard