Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he has worked as a community worker, poet and publisher, Keith Armstrong is coordinator of the Northern Voices creative writing and community publishing project which specialises in recording the experiences of people in the north east of England.

As well as being organiser of several community arts festivals in the region, and of literary events featuring the likes of Yevtushenko, Douglas Dunn, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah and Liz Lochhead, he was founder of the Strong Words and Durham Voices community publishing series and of Tyneside Street Press, and has recently compiled and edited books on the Durham Miners' Gala and on the former mining communities of County Durham.

He is studying for a PhD on the work of Newcastle writer Jack Common at the University of Durham where he received a Masters Degree in 1998 for his studies on regional culture in the North East of England. He was Year of the Artist 2000 poet-in-residence at Hexham Races. His poetry has been extensively published in magazines such as Poetry Review, Other Poetry, Iron, The Poetry Business, and Poetry Scotland , as well as in the collections The Jingling Geordie, Dreaming North and Pains of Class, on cassette, LP & CD, and on radio & TV. He has also written for music-theatre productions, including O'er the Hills and Wor Jackie (1988) for Northumberland Theatre Company; Pig's Meat (1997 & 2000) for Bruvvers Theatre Company; and The Roker Roar (1998) for Monkwearmouth Youth Theatre Company. Other commissioned work includes Fire & Brimstone (1989) and The Hexham Celebration (1992), both for the Hexham Abbey Festival; Suite for the River Wear (1989) for BBC Radio; and The Little Count (1993) for Durham County Council. He won the Kate Collingwood Bursary Award in 1986.

He has performed his poetry on several occasions at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and at literature festivals in Cardiff , Cheltenham , Durham , Lancaster , and throughout the land. He has also toured the former Soviet Union , Bulgaria , Iceland (including readings during the Cod War), Denmark , France , Germany , Sweden , and The Netherlands.

He worked as a community arts development worker in East Durham for six years in the 1980s and has long pioneered cultural exchanges with Durham 's twinning partners, particularly Tuebingen and Nordenham in Germany and Ivry-sur-Seine and Amiens in France , as well as with Newcastle 's Dutch twin-city of Groningen . In fact, he has visited Tuebingen some 22 times since he first spent a month there in November 1987 as poet-in-residence supported by Durham County Council and the Kulturamt, and he has performed his poetry in the city's Hoelderlin Tower and as part of the annual Book Festival.

He has won Northern Arts Awards to visit Berlin in 1990 and in 2001 to pursue his studies of Dutch regional culture. His travels to Denmark , Germany , Holland and Sweden have also been supported by the British Council. He was the judge for the Sid Chaplin Short Story Awards in 2000.

He often works with folk musicians from north east England , including Jez Lowe, Marie Little and George Welch, and he has written the lyrics for an album by folk-rock band The Whisky Priests, with whom he has toured extensively in The Netherlands. He has also visited the European Parliament in Strasbourg to perform his poetry with musicians Pete Challoner and Ian Carr. Though a regionalist inspired by the landscape of his birth, he is very much a European and his work is much influenced by writers such as Hoelderlin, Hesse , Brecht, Baudelaire, Prevert, Esenin, and Mayakovsky. In 2002, he visited New York City to give readings with the aid of a further Northern Arts Award. Keith also visited Prague in September 2003 for readings with poet Paul Summers with the support of Arts Council England, North East.