Next Buzzwords Sunday June 12th
Upstairs at the Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
Workshop lead by Ann Drysdale 7pm
Open mic and readings 8pm
Guest poet Ann Drysdale, who will be launching her new collection
pay on the door, £5 waged, £3 unwaged.
Regardless of what the government is saying, we are still in a pandemic - please continue to take precautions
Ann Drysdale 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 seven poetry collections, The Turn of the Cucumber, Gay Science, Backwork, Between Dryden and Duffy, Quaintness and Other Offences, Miss Jekyll’s Gardening Boots and Vanitas are all rolling round in the collective memory of the Muse and her eighth, Feeling Unusual, has recently joined them.
