The glottal stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or ʻokina in Hawaiʻi among those using a preservative pronunciation of that name.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʔ⟩. It is called the glottal stop because the technical term for the gap between the vocal folds, which is closed up in the production of this sound, is the glottis.

Features of the glottal stop:

While this segment is not a writtenphoneme in English, it is present phonetically in nearly all dialects of English as an allophone of /t/ in the syllable coda. Speakers of Cockney, Scottish English and several other British dialects also pronounce an intervocalic /t/ between vowels as in city. Standard English inserts a glottal stop before a tautosyllabic voiceless stop, e.g. sto’p, tha’t, kno’ck, wa’tch, also lea’p, soa’k, hel’p, pin’ch.

Heather McHugh (born August 20, 1948) is an American poet.

Heather McHugh, a poet, translator, and educator, was born in San Diego, California, to Canadian parents, John Laurence, a marine biologist, and Eileen Francesca (Smallwood). They raised McHugh in Gloucester Point, Virginia. There, her father directed the marine biological laboratory on the York River. She began writing poetry at age five and claims to have become an expert “eavesdropper” by the age of twelve. At the age of seventeen, she entered Harvard University. Her most notable work was Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993, which won the Bingham Poetry Prize of the Boston Book Review and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize. The New York Times Book Review named this work the Notable Book of the Year.

McHugh was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. She teaches at the University of Washington and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

In 2009, she was awarded the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" for her work.

Paul Celan (23 November 1920, Cernăuţi, Bukovina, Kingdom of Romania, current Chernivtsi, Ukraine – c. 20 April 1970, Paris) was a poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel into a Jewish family in Romania, and changed his name to "Paul Celan" (where Celan in Romanian would be pronounced Chelan, and was derived from Ancel, pronounced Antshel), becoming one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.

Celan was born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuţi, Northern Bukovina, a region then part of Romania and earlier part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, among others (now part of Ukraine). His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who advocated his son's education in Hebrew at Safah Ivriah, an institution previously convinced of the wisdom of assimilation into Austrian culture, and one which favourably received Chaim Weizmann of the World Zionist Organization in 1927.

His mother, Fritzi, was an avid reader of German literature who insisted German be the language of the house. After his Bar Mitzvah in 1933, Celan abandoned Zionism (at least to some extent) and finished his formal Hebrew education, instead becoming active in Jewish Socialist organizations and fostering support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His earliest known poem, titled Mother's Day 1938 was an earnest, if sentimental, profession of love. In 1934, fourteen-year old Paul wrote a letter to his aunt Minna in Palestine, in which there is the eloquent phrase: "With regard to anti-Semitism in our school, I could write you a 300-page book."

Susan Murray BJ is now a strategist at the International Development Research Centre. She was also a political communications director and formerly a Canadian broadcast journalist. She graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism degree from Carleton University. Her home community is Ottawa, Ontario.

After a career at CBC, she became communications director for Scott Brison in August 2004. Brison was a cabinet minister in the federal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin.

On January 11, 2006, a microphone caught Murray mumbling "That's Bullshit!" at Brad Lavigne of the NDP on live television after he commented that the Liberals were running on 12 years of broken promises.