Next Sunday, 1st April

Next Sunday, 1st April at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Writing workshop 7pm

Guest reading and open mic 8pm

Guest Poet - Ross Cogan who will also run the workshop


£5 waged, £3 unwaged

Ross Cogan:

I studied philosophy at university, gaining a Ph.D. from Bristol, and
currently work as a writer, researcher and editor. My first collection,
'Stalin’s Desk', was published in 2005 by Oversteps Books, while my second,
'The Book I Never Wrote', appeared in 2012 with the same publisher. I am
also currently Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

In 1999 I won an Eric Gregory Award. I have won the Exeter Poetry Prize, the
Frogmore Poetry Prize, the Staple Open Poetry Competition, and the Crabbe
Memorial Prize and have been a runner up in the Frogmore, Staple and Crabbe
Memorial Competitions, as well as the Poetry London, Cardiff International,
Ver Poets and Salisbury Kick Start Poets Competitions.

My poetry has been published in a number of magazines including PN Review,
The Rialto, Poetry London, Acumen, Stand, Orbis, New Welsh Review, The
Interpreter’s House, The Frogmore Papers, Smiths Knoll, Envoi, Staple, The
Swansea Review, Poetry Nottingham International, Oxford Poetry, Third Way,
Prop and the May Anthologies. A poem was also selected for 'Lung Jazz: Young
British Poets for Oxfam', forthcoming from Cinnamon Press.

Next Sunday, 4th March

Next Sunday, 4th March at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Writing workshop 7pm

Guest reading and open mic 8pm

Guest Poet - Elizabeth Cook, who will also run the workshop

£5 waged, £3 unwaged

Elizabeth Cook's poems have appeared in magazines including Agenda, Magma, Moving Worlds, Poetry London, Stand, and The Shop. The title poem of her first collection, Bowl (Worple, 2006), was a Poem on the Underground in 2008. Her fiction Achilles (Methuen 2001) has had a performance life: it won a Fringe First at Edinburgh and has been performed at the RNT’s Cottesloe Theatre as well as at various festivals (including Cheltenham!). She wrote the libretto of Francis Grier's The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth (broadcast live on radio 3 on Good Friday 2007) and has recently collaborated with him again on a vespers setting. She is also the editor of John Keats: the Major Works (Oxford). She was brought up in Nigeria and Dorset and now lives in London, where she works in complementary medicine, and East Anglia, where she writes.

Change of Date!

Please note: the Exmouth will be closed on our usual date, 5th February, so we will be running on the following Sunday, 12th February. Everything else as advertised

Buzzwords, Sunday February 5th

Next Buzzwords: Sunday February 5th
at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Writing workshop 7pm
Guest reading and open mic 8pm

Guest Poet - Stephen Payne, who will also run the workshop

£5 waged, £3 unwaged

Stephen Payne

In 2010 Stephen was awarded the Smiths Knoll mentorship by Michael
Laskey and Joanna Cutts. His pamphlet The Probabilities of Balance
was published by Smiths Knoll at the end of that year. His poems have
been published in many magazines including Poetry Wales, The Rialto,
The North and The Dark Horse. He has been a guest poet at Mancy Poets
and Poets & Players in Manchester and reads regularly in the Bath area
and at Seren’s First Thursday event in Cardiff. Stephen was born in
Merthyr Tydfil and now lives with his family in Penarth, South
Glamorgan. He has worked as a professor in Cardiff University School
of Psychology and in Manchester Business School, and currently is
professor of human-centric systems in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Bath.

Buzzwords, Sunday January 8th

Next Buzzwords: Sunday January 8th
at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Writing workshop 7pm
Guest reading and open mic 8pm

Guest Poet - Jonathan Davidson, who will also run the workshop


Jonathan Davidson

Jonathan Davidson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990 and his first collection of poetry, The Living Room, was published by Arc Publications in 1994. He has published two poetry pamphlets, Moving the Stereo (Jackson’s Arm, 1993) and A Horse Called House (Smith/Doorstop, 1997). His radio plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, along with radio adaptations of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and W S Graham’s The Nightfishing. His stage adaptation of Mary Webb’s novel Precious Bane was produced by Interplay Theatre and toured extensively in 2008 and 2009. He is Director of Midland Creative Projects Limited, Associate Director of the Birmingham Book Festival and Chief Executive of Writing West Midlands. Born in 1964, Jonathan grew up in Didcot, South Oxfordshire. He now lives in Coventry and is married with two children.

Sunday 4th December

Next Buzzwords - Sunday 4th December
Upstairs at The Exmouth, Bath Road, Cheltenham

7pm - workshop
8pm - Guest readings and open mic

£5 waged, £3 unwaged

Guest poet - Colin Watts who will also run the workshop

Colin Watts

Born in Staines to the sound of doodlebugs overshooting London. Trained as a town planner, but turned to community development and training in the early 1970's. Has worked part-time for the Liverpool Adult Learning Service for the last seven years as Community Learning Manager.

Started writing around about 1990, has had stories on Radio Merseyside, plays performed professionally, poetry published in numerous magazines and won prizes. Runner up in the Biscuit Publishing short story competition, 2011.

Booklet: Singing the City, self-published, 1999.
Booklet: Getting The Hang Of It, Driftwood Publications, 2002.
First collection: Human Geography, Driftwood Publications, 2005.
Second collection, Taking Down the Tree House, Headland Publications, 2011.

Will read at poetry venues across the UK if asked (has senior rail card, will travel). Freelance creative writing tutor with Adult Learning Service, WEA, University of Liverpool, Sefton Arts.

Founder member of the Dead Good Poets Society, flourishing in Liverpool since 1991. Currently, chair.

‘Colin Watts is a born storyteller.’ Nessa O'Mahony, Orbis magazine.

’After reading Zen and the Art of Peeling an Orange I will never dismiss citrus fruit as just one of my 'five-a-day' again.’ Christina McAlpine, Citizen 32.

‘Brilliant adventures in real and imaginary worlds.’ Jean Sprackland.

Website: www.colinwatts.net

Sunday 6th November

Next Buzzwords, Sunday, 6th November
Upstairs at The Exmouth, Bath Road, Cheltenham

7pm - workshop
8pm - Guest readings and open mic

£5 waged, £3 unwaged

Guest poet - Ann Drysdale who will also run the workshop


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 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.

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 holder of the Dylan Thomas Prize for poetry in performance.

Her five poetry collections, Between Dryden and Duffy, The Turn of the Cucumber, Gay Science, Backwork and Quaintness and Other Offences are all rolling round in the collective consciousness of the Muse and, in the true tradition of the penurious troubadour, copies will doubtless be available on the night!