Next Buzzwords, Sunday January 6th

Next Buzzwords Sunday, January 6th

7pm - workshop led by David Calcutt
8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poet: David Calcutt

Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Waged £5, unwaged £3

 

David Calcutt is a playwright, poet and novelist based in the West Midlands. He has written many plays for the theatre and for BBC Radio, several of which are frequently repeated on Radio 4 Extra. He is co-director of Regional Voice Theatre, his most recent work for the company being "The Darlaston Dog Fight", and he is also writer-in-residence for Midland Actors Theatre, for whom he has written several touring and community productions. He is the author of six books for young people, several short stories, and four collections of poetry, the most recent of which are "The Old Man in the House of Bone", for V. Press, and "The Last of the Light is not the Last of the Light" for Fair Acre Press."

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday, December 2nd

Next Buzzwords Sunday, December 2nd

7pm - workshop led by Ann Drysdale
8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poet:Ann Drysdale

Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Waged £5, unwaged £3

All About Ann Drysdale. (Well, nearly…)

Ann was born near Manchester and brought up in London. She has lived in places as disparate as a narrowboat in the Midlands and a smallholding on the North York Moors where she learned stockmanship by experiment and brought up three children as a single parent. During this time she wrote one of the longest-running by-line columns in the provincial press. She now lives in the highest terrace of a mining town in South Wales.

In 1988 she started a degree course in English Literature at York, but having left formal education in the sixties she had not realised that the language of critical theory had developed along entirely different lines from that of literature itself and her vocabulary proved inadequate. She was later awarded an MA in the teaching and practice of creative writing, has been a visiting lecturer at Cardiff University and spent eighteen months as writer-in-residence at UWE, Bristol. She has taught at all levels, from Arvon to special needs primary schools and collaborated with photographer Tim Collier on a book of poems celebrating the changing face of the South Wales valleys as well as writing a gonzo guidebook to the city of Newport as part of the “Real Wales” series from Seren.

She is an accomplished and popular reader of her own and other people’s work, once reaching the final of the Cheltenham All-comers’ Slam. Her first volume was shortlisted at Aldeburgh in 1995. Individual poems have won prizes in the Manchester, Cardiff, Peterloo, Housman Society, Bridport and National poetry competitions and she is the current (last!) holder of the Dylan Thomas Prize for poetry in performance.

Her first five poetry collections, Between Dryden and Duffy, The Turn of the Cucumber, Gay Science, Backwork and Quaintness and Other Offences have been joined by Miss Jekyll’s Gardening Boots (which is dedicated to loyal listeners at Buzzwords). All of these are rolling round in the collective memory of the Muse and a seventh collection is in progress and accreting nicely.

Next Buzzwords Sunday November 4th

Next Buzzwords Sunday November 4th

7pm - workshop led by Graham Burchell
8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poet: Graham Burchell

Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Waged £5, unwaged £3

Graham Burchell was born in Canterbury and now lives in South Devon. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Following his Pindrop publication, ‘The Chongololo Club’, his third collection ‘Kate' and his fourth ‘Cottage Pi’ (one of the winners of the inaugural Sentinel poetry book competition) were published in 2015. He was the 2012 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year, a 2013 Hawthornden Fellow, winner of the 2015 National Stanza competition, runner up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2016 and third prize winner in the 2017 Bridport Prize. His poem ‘Resurrection’ was also highly commended in the best single poem category of the 2018 Forward Prizes.

Next Buzzwords Sunday October 7th

Next Buzzwords, Sunday October 7th
7pm - workshop led by Rebecca Gethin
8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poet: Rebecca Gethin
Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
Waged £5, unwaged £3

Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor in Devon.  In 2017 two pamphlets were published: A Sprig of Rowan by Three Drops Press and All the Time in the World by Cinnamon Press who also published an earlier collection called A Handful of Water and two novels.  She has been a Hawthornden Fellow. In 2018 she jointly won the Coast to Coast Pamphlet competition and has been awarded a writing residency at Brisons Veor.   www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com 

Next Buzzwords, Sunday September 2nd

Next Buzzwords, Sunday September 2nd

7pm - workshop led by Ross Cogan
8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poets: Ross Cogan and Alison Brackenbury

Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
Waged £5, unwaged £3

Alison Brackenbury’s tenth collection is ‘Aunt Margaret’s Pudding’, (HappenStance Press, 2018). Its poems were one of the ingredients of a recent Radio 4 programme and were featured in ‘Pick of the Week’. ‘Gallop’, her Selected Poems, will be published by Carcanet in February 2019. 

Ross Cogan has published two collections, Stalin’s Desk and The Book I Never Wrote, with Oversteps; a third, Bragr, was published by Seren in July 2018. His verse play, Achyncourt, was performed in Cheltenham and Wantage and broadcast on local radio. works as a writer/researcher, as well as being a Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. A Gregory Award winner, he has won the Exeter, Frogmore, Cannon Sonnet and Staple Prizes, and been placed in others. His poetry has appeared in The Guardian, Poetry London, PN Review, and a number of other journals.

 

Next Buzzwords Sunday July 15th

Next Buzzwords, Sunday July 15th

7pm - workshop led by David Clarke and Jennie Farley
8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poets: David Clarke and Jennie Farley

Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
Waged £5, unwaged £3

David Clarke’s first pamphlet, Gaud, won the Michael Marks Award in 2013. His first collection, Arc, appeared with Nine Arches in 2015. A further pamphlet, Scare Stories was published by V Press in 2017. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Magma, Tears in the Fence, Long Poem Magazine and The Interpreter’s House. He is currently working on his second collection.

Jennie Farley is a poet, workshop leader and teacher. She lives in Cheltenham and is active in the local poetry scene. Her poetry has featured in magazines including New Welsh Review, Under the Radar, The Interpreter's House, Oxford Poetry, Prole, anthologies and online journals. She has performed her work at the a number of festivals, The Everyman Theatre and other local venues. She founded and runs NewBohemians@CharltonKings an arts club providing regular events of poetry, music, performance and workshops. Recently she was commissioned with 8 poets to write a poem for a national project Still Born initiated by Adinda van t'Klooster to raise awareness of stillbirth through art and poetry. Jennie's first collection My Grandmother Skating (Indigo Dreams Pub) was published 2016. Her new collection Hex is out 2018.

Next Buzzwords Sunday 3rd June

Next Buzzwords, Sunday June 3rd
 
7pm - workshop led by Angela France
 8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poet: Susan Richardson
 
Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
Waged £5, unwaged £3

Susan Richardson's fourth collection of poetry, Words the Turtle Taught Me, themed around endangered marine species, has just been published by Cinnamon Press in 2018. In addition to her recent residency with the Marine Conservation Society, she is currently poet-in-residence with both the global animal welfare initiative, World Animal Day, and the British Animal Studies Network, facilitated by the University of Strathclyde. Susan has performed on BBC 2, Radio 4 and at festivals both nationally and internationally. She co-edits Zoomorphic digital literary magazine. www.susanrichardsonwriter.co.u k  

Next Buzzwords Sunday May 6th

Next Buzzwords, Sunday May 6th
 
7pm - workshop led by Jane Commane and Tania Hershman
 8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poets: Jane Commane and Tania Hershman
 
Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
Waged £5, unwaged £3

Jane Commane is a poet, editor and publisher. Her first full length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. In 2016, she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development programme. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, for a decade she also worked in museums and archives. Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, and is co-author, with Jo Bell, of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook (Nine Arches Press). In 2017 she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship.

 Tania Hershman's debut poetry collection, Terms & Conditions, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2017 and her third short story collection, Some Of Us Glow More Than Others, by Unthank Books. Tania is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Nothing Here Is Wild, Everything Is Open, and two short story collections, My Mother Was An Upright Piano, and The White Road and Other Stories, and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers' & Artists' Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014). Tania is curator of short story hub ShortStops (www.shortstops.info), celebrating short story activity across the UK & Ireland, and has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics. Hear her read her work on https://soundcloud.com/taniahe rshman and find out more here: www.taniahershman.com

Next Buzzwords Sunday April 8th

Next Buzzwords, Sunday April 8th
 
7pm - workshop (leader TBA)
 8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poet: Roy McFarlane
 
Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
Waged £5, unwaged £3

Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and spent most of his years living in Wolverhampton and the surrounding Black Country. He has held the role of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Starbucks and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Poet in Residence. He was commended by the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017 for ‘1999 – Parts of a broken man’. His publications include writer and editor of Celebrate Wha? Ten Black British Poets from the Midlands (Smokestack 2011) and Beginning With Your Last Breath (Nine Arches Press 2016). Roy’s presently completing his MA in Writing Poetry with The Poetry School and Newcastle University.