Guest readings and open mic 8pm
Guest poet: Michael W Thomas
Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
£5 waged, £3 unwaged
Michael W Thomas
Michael Wyndham Thomas is an
Irish-British writer. He lived in Canada for a number of years, and he
has been published extensively--and given numerous readings--in the
UK, North America and Europe. He is now based in Worcestershire.
He is an internationally-known poet, fiction-writer, dramatist and musician. His poetry, prose and scripts have appeared in Aereings,
English, The English Review, Fire, The Interpreter's House, Iron, The
London Magazine, Other Poetry, Pennine Platform, Stand, Staple and The Swansea Review (UK), as well as Poetry Salzburg Review and The National Gazette (Tirana), Alive!, From the Horse's Mouth, Grain and Reflections (Canada), Etchings (Australia),The Black Mountain Review and Irish University Review (Ireland) and The Antioch Review, Magazine Six, Modern Haiku, Muscadine Lines and The Secret of Salt (USA). He also reviews for Other Poetry (Durham, UK), Poetry Nottingham (UK), Under The Radar (Rugby, UK) and The Journal of American Haiku (Toronto).
Michael's first poetry collection, God's Machynlleth and Other Poems, is available from Flarestack. His latest collection, Port Winston Mulberry, is published by Littlejohn and Bray in 2010; while his CD, Seventeen Poems (and a Bit of a Song) is now on release from MayB Studios. His novel, The Mercury Annual, was published in 2009 by Silver Age. His novel, Pilgrims at the White Horizon, is appearing in 2012, as is his poetry collection The Girl from Midfoxfields.
His play, FAQ, was performed at the Worcester Festival, 2009, and also the Progress Theatre Drama Festival, Reading, 2009; his play, When?, was staged as part of the West Midlands Script project in Spring 2010. He was shortlisted for the 2009 Wasafiri Fiction Prize, and, in the 2010 Bridport Prize, he was nominated in both the poetry and fiction sections.
Since April, 2004, Michael has been
poet-in-residence at the annual Robert Frost Poetry Festival, Key
West, Florida. In consequence, he is now Poet-at-Large in the Navy of
the Conch Republic of Key West. He undertakes these bardic duties
with due solemnity and happy bafflement. Other recent events outside
the UK include a reading at Linnaeus University, Sweden, in March 2010,
and at Tampere University, Finland, in May 2011. His latest
publications have been in literary journals in Albania—not that this
threatens Norman Wisdom’s pre-eminence in that country.
