Next Buzzwords Sunday May 10th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday May 10th

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 

7pm Workshop led by Sue Leigh

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Sue Leigh

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

 

Sue Leigh’s work has been published in the TLS, Oxford Magazine and elsewhere. She has had two books published with Two Rivers, Chosen Hill and Her Orchards, and two limited-edition pamphlets with Evergreen Press, ‘Chalk’ and ‘Simmer Dim’. A third pamphlet, ‘Angel Roof’ will be published later this year.

 She teaches at the University of Oxford and runs her own poetry course, ‘Conversations in Poetry’.

 

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday April 12th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday April 12th

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 7pm Workshop led by Vanessa Lampert

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet Vanessa Lampert

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

 

Vanessa Lampert is a writer, mentor, editor and teacher of poetry. Her work is widely published, recently in Magma, The Oxford Times, The Rialto, The London Magazine, Under the Radar, Oxford Poetry, and Poetry London. She runs workshops nationwide for adults and in schools and volunteers at Oxford Poetry Library. She was a co-founder of The Alchemy Spoon magazine and is a committee member for Poetry in Aldeburgh.

 Vanessa has won the Café Writers, Edward Thomas, Ashdown Forest and Sentinel prizes and the Ver Poetry prize (twice). She has been placed in many others including commendations in the Troubadour, Magma, Bridport, Verve, and National Competitions.

Vanessa’s pamphlet On Long Loan’ was published by Live Canon in 2020 and her full collection ‘Say It With Me’ was published by Seren in 2023. Poems from that collection have been published in the Daily Telegraph poem of the week and the Forward Prizes anthology 2024.

She has recently edited a collection of poems on a theme of wellbeing for Candlestick Press.

Vanessa works as an acupuncturist in Oxfordshire.

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday March 8th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday March 8th

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 7pm Workshop led by JLM Morton

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet  JLM Morton

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

 

JLM Morton has won the Laurie Lee Prize, been longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize and her nonfiction has been published in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and is widely published, including in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia and The London Magazine. Juliette is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes. Her debut poetry collection is Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society book of the year. Her second collection is forthcoming in 2026. 

Next Buzzwords Sunday February 8th

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday February 8th

 Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

 7pm Workshop lead by Alison Brackenbury

Open mic and readings 8pm

Guest poet  Alison Brackenbury

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

 

Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire, from a long line of skilled servants and farmworkers. She has received two major awards from the Society of Authors and has broadcast frequently on national BBC Radio. Her ten poetry collections are all published by Carcanet Press.  ‘Gallop’, her Selected Poems, was published in 2019. Her latest poetry collection is ‘Thorpeness’, published in 2022.

In 2025, Alison published her only prose book, a non-fiction account of her Lincolnshire childhood home. called ‘Village’. Nicola Chester, the Guardian Nature Diarist, described ‘Village’, in a recent review, as

 ‘a glorious, generous compendium. A selection box of delights and a romp through stories, and revelations, that overlap in layers, like a coloured tissue-paper lantern... full of the most beautiful, poetic language’.