Next Buzzwords Sunday December 14th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday December 14th

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 7pm Workshop lead by Carrie Etter

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Carrie Etter

 £5 waged, £3 unwaged, pay on the door

 

Carrie Etter has published five collections of poetry, most recently Grief's Alphabet (Seren, 2024), and a chapbook of flash fiction. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, Shearsman, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals and anthologies internationally. After 18 years teaching creative writing at Bath Spa University, in 2022 she joined the faculty at the University of Bristol. 

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday 9th November

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday November 9th

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 7pm Workshop lead by Anna Saunders

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Anna Saunders

 £5 waged, £3 unwaged, pay on the door

 

Anna Saunders is the author of eight books: Communion, Kissing the She Bear (Wild Conversations Press),  Struck (Pindrop Press), Burne Jones and the Fox, Ghosting for Beginners, Feverfew, The Prohibition of Touch, and Eurydice in the Ruined House (all Indigo Dreams).  Fran Lock said of Eurydice in the Ruined House ‘this is a deft and generous work in which to delight’, and Samatar Elmi described it as ‘ a triumph of vision, craft, and execution’. 

Anna has been widely published in journals and holds four Arts Council Awards. She is the co-editor, with Ronnie Goodyer, of the anthology Dear Dylan ( Indigo Dreams). She is the Founding Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival.  Anna has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’, (The North), ‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts,’ ( Bernard O’Donoghue), and ‘a modern mythmaker’ - Paul Stephenson. 

The American poet Joseph Fasano said of her ‘Anna Saunders' poems reach back to the very origins of who we are, and, in their contact with the ancient things, they transform themselves into freshness, newness, life. Dripping with myth, they sing, they mourn, they celebrate. There is magic in these poems—not the superficial magic of illusion but the deep magic of being.’

 

 

 

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday 5th October

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday October 5th

 

Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 7pm Workshop lead by Maggie Brookes-Butt

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Maggie Brookes-Butt

 £5 waged, £3 unwaged, pay on the door

 

Maggie Brookes-Butt has been writing all her life, as a journalist, BBC TV producer, poet and novelist. Her most recent book is 'Wish - new and selected poems', which gathers work from six previous poetry collections (under the name Maggie Butt) alongside 21 new poems.  Her two historical novels were published as Maggie Brookes by Penguin Random House. She taught creative writing at Middlesex University for 30 years, has a PhD in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. As well as being a writer she is a compulsive reader, hopeful gardener, dreadful cook, besotted grandmother and a Londoner to the bone, though she loves to swim in the sea. Poetry website: www.maggiebutt.co.uk Fiction website: www.maggiebrookes.uk  Instagram: maggie__brookes

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday 14th September

 

 Next Buzzwords Sunday September 14th

 

Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 *Please note change of guest poet*

7pm Workshop lead by Zoe Brooks

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Zoe Brooks

 

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

Zoe Brooks has been widely published in print and online magazines. Zoe’s poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, including Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology (Butcher’s Dog) and Contemporary Surrealist and Magic Realist Poetry (Lamar University Press).

 

Her long poem Fool's Paradise won the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition award for best poetry ebook 2013. Her collection Owl Unbound was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in October 2020 and Fool’s Paradise was published as a print book by Black Eyes Publishing in 2022. Her third collection provisionally called Something In Nothing will be published by Indigo Dreams in 2026.

 

Zoe is a director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, leading on the Festival’s year-round online programme.

 

 

  

Next Buzzwords Sunday July 13th

 Next Buzzwords Sunday July 13th 

Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 

7pm Workshop lead by Rory Waterman

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Rory Waterman

 

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up in Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham. He has published four collections with Carcanet Press: Tonight the Summer's Over (2013), which was a PBS Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize; Sarajevo Roses (2017), shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize; Sweet Nothings (2020); and Come Here to This Gate (2024). He also co-edits New Walk Editions and writes regularly for the TLS, PN Review, and elsewhere. He is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University. Website: www.rorywaterman.com.  

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday June 8th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday June 8th

Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 

7pm Workshop lead by Anna Saunders

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Robin Gilbert

 

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

 Robin Gilbert has lived for over fifty years in the “Wide Valley”, which stretches beneath the Cotswold escarpment from Cooper’s Hill in the south to Shurdington Hill in the north.  In 1971, he moved to Gloucestershire on joining GCHQ, where he worked for 35 years, the last fifteen of them in international relations.  He had written poems, on and off, for most of his life, and, soon after retirement in 2006, he started to attend meetings of the Cheltenham Poetry Society, Holub and Buzzwords. He has two previous (self-published) collections, My Own Dragon (2006) and DaDa & the Dark Lady (2012), and has enjoyed modest success in the Buzzwords and Cannon’s Mouth Sonnet or Not competitions. From 2013 to 2019, he was co-Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

Next Buzzwords Sunday, May 11th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday May 11th

Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 

7pm Workshop lead by Christina Thatcher

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Christina Thatcher

 

 pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.

 

Christina Thatcher grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to undertake two MAs in the UK, after which she completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University, where she is now a lecturer. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher's Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, The Poetry Review and more. She has two previous poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). Christina has toured internationally, reading her work in the UK, USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Switzerland, and Romania. christinathatcher.com / @writetoempower.