It was a real honour for us to host the Leeds Heat of the Roundhouse Poetry Slam last week – particularly as it’s the first time that the iconic competition as visited our city.
All nine competitors absolutely blew us away. Huge congratulations to Birmingham-based poet Bradley Taylor who won on the night and progressed to the Grand Final in London!
We were buzzing to attract a full house at Hyde Park Book Club. If you fancy joining us there again, check out our LIVEwire x Bad Betty collab on 21 May! Thanks to Josh Hill for the highlights videos and images.
This first series of Clevedon poetry workshops concludes on Saturday 11 May and will be delivered by Saili Katebe! It’ll take place from 12.30-2.30 at Theatre Shop, and tickets are Pay As You Feel (£3, £5, £7).
As with all of our workshops, it’s predominantly targeted at writers who identify as working-class, or as coming from a working-class background. That said, everybody is welcome – whether established poets or total novices!
Saili Katebe is a Zambian-born writer, performer and workshop facilitator based in the South West of England. His work celebrates the musicality of language and the power of art as a way to connect people through story and creativity.
We’re teaming up with Bad Betty for a third time – bringing you an evening of stellar live poetry performances to Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds! Our line-up includes Kayo Chingonyi, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Molly Naylor, and Samantha Fain.
Tickets are available here for £6 (£4 concessions).
Kayo Chingonyi FRSL was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry and of The Civitella Ranieri Foundation. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize by The Poetry Society and was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester before joining Durham University as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He is a writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast Decode on Spotify, poetry editor at Bloomsbury, and his most recent collection A Blood Condition was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa is a British-born, Barbadian-raised choreopoet. Her interdisciplinary art braids dance and poetry. Safiya is also PhD student at the University of Leeds in Cultural Studies. Safiya is an Obsidian Foundation fellow and an Apples & Snakes/ Jerwood Arts Poetry in Performance recipient.
Molly Naylor is a poet, scriptwriter, performer and director. Her stories and plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and she has performed at festivals and events all over the world. She has published three poetry collections her third was published by Bad Betty in spring 2022. She is the co-creator and writer of Sky One comedy After Hours. She wrote and performed the acclaimed solo spoken-word shows Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You and My Robot Heart. Her first graphic novel was published in September 2021.
Samantha Fain is a poet from Indiana. Her chapbook Coughing Up Planets debuted with VA Press in March of 2021. Her microchapbook, sad horse music, debuted with The Daily Drunk in May of 2021. Catalina Ponce of Cicada Editora translated this work, and Música de Caballo Triste was published in 2023. Sam is the co- editor of Kiss Your Darlings: A Taylor Swift Anthology, out with Olney Magazine in 2022. Are You There is her debut full-length collection, published by Bad Betty in 2024.
The second of our Huddersfield workshop series will be led by Kim Moore! It takes place at TEN Queen Street (part of the Lawrence Batley Theatre) on Saturday 11 May, and this session runs from 11am-1pm.
Tickets are Pay As You Feel (£3, £5, £7) and are available here.
Everybody is welcome, but we particularly encourage writers who identify as working-class or as coming from a working-class background. The final session will take place in the Attic Theatre (also part of Lawrence Batley Theatre) on Saturday 1 June from 11am-1pm.
Poetry writing workshop in Huddersfield on 11 May
Kim Moore’s pamphletIfWe Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. Her first collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Her first non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me was published by Smith/Doorstop in May 2022. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. A hybrid book of lyric essays and poetry Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism was published by Seren in March 2023.
We return to Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery on Saturday 27 April for the second of our workshop series here this spring. After last month’s fantastic opening session with Oliver James Lomax, we’re now thrilled to introduce Louise Fazackerley as our guest facilitator.
The workshop takes place from 10am-12pm.
Poetry workshop in Blackburn on Saturday 27 April
As always, our workshops are open to everybody, but we particularly encourage participants to identify as working-class or as coming from a working-class background.
Our workshops are designed to be a safe and supportive space in which you can explore new ideas or just sharpen your mind generally. Tickets are Pay As You Feel and are priced at £3, £5, and £7 – they’re available here.
Louise Fazackerley
Louise Fazackerley
With work rooted in the working class, Louise Fazackerley explores the world in a way that makes the ugly, beautiful, and the mundane, fantastical. Winner of BBC Radio 3 ‘New Voices’, European Slam Finalist and support artist for punk legend Dr. John Cooper Clark, Louise is a true, Northern, powerhouse. As seen and heard on BBC 1 Breakfast television, BBC Radio 3, and Woman’s Hour BBC Radio 4.
Published poetry collections include The Pleasure Dome (Burning Eye), The Lolitas (Verve Poetry Press), The Uniform Factory (Verve Poetry Press), Bird St. (The Secret Writers Club), and audio book, Council House Poetry (Nymphs & Thugs.) Louise has a degree in Theatre Studies and Creative Writing from Lancaster University, an MA in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University, and is an experienced teacher. She lectures and teaches creative writing in schools, prisons, and universities. When she is not writing, Louise is loping around Wigan and wrangling two teenage daughters and two teenage cats.
The ninth installment of our Tubthumping night in Farsley saw us welcome Hollie McNish to a sold-out Old Woollen as part of her Lobster tour. We had a stunning support slot from Maria Ferguson, plus our showcase section – featuring Vic Leeson, Simone Yasmin, and Claudia Wardle.
Huge thanks to Adam Webb for filming and producing this highlights video, as well as providing the stills below.
Tubthumping No.9 highlights
Please like the YouTube video and subscribe to our new channel if you fancy more of the same!
And if you’re keen for more of the same in the Leeds area, join us at Hyde Park Book Club on Monday 29 April for the Roundhouse Poetry Slam regional heats.
We return to Theatre Shop in Clevedon on Saturday 20 April for the second of our workshop series here this spring. After last month’s fantastic opening session with Danny Carlo Pandolfi, we’re now thrilled to introduce Josie Alford as our guest facilitator.
The workshop takes place from 12.30-2.30pm.
Poetry workshop in Clevedon on Saturday 20 April
As always, our workshops are open to everybody, but we particularly encourage participants to identify as working-class or as coming from a working-class background.
Our workshops are designed to be a safe and supportive space in which you can explore new ideas or just sharpen your mind generally. Tickets are Pay As You Feel and are priced at £3, £5, and £7 – they’re available here.
Josie Alford
Josie Alford
Enigmatic, mysterious, drenched in shadow… Josie Alford is none of these things.
Josie Alford is a Bristol-based poet and freelance creative. Her stage presence is sequinned, pop culture referencing, infectious, & welcoming. Once seen, never forgotten, her work ranges from the subtlety of dealing with loss to analysing the nuanced discography of the Spice Girls.
She also makes YouTube videos on all things poetry covering subjects from writing poetry to getting your collection published. Her debut poetry collection, Faulty Manufacturing is published by Verve Poetry Press.
One of the things that we’re most excited about with LIVEwire is gradually building a small network of nights around the country. We recently returned to Manchester for the third time, but later this month, we’re venturing to a brand-new location!
Join us at Front Room Theatre in Weston-super-Mare on Thursday 25 April as we introduce LIVEwire Weston to North Somerset. Our line-up is effectively a triple-headliner: Laurie Bolger, Vanessa Kisuule, and Kat Lyons!
LIVEwire Weston No.1 at Front Room Theatre on 25 April
Tickets are available here on a Pay As You Feel basis. The minimum price is £5 and the suggested price is £12.
This won’t be our first outing in the South West: we visited the Arnolfini in Bristol back in November 2019 as part of a Nymphs & Thugs LIVEwire tour. We love the Bristol scene and it’s always exciting to see what happens there.
The opportunity to stage something in Weston-super-Mare was irresistible to us, though, and we can’t wait to introduce ourselves to the Weston audience. See you there…
Laurie Bolger is a London-based writer and the founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. Laurie’s work has been widely anthologised and has featured at Glastonbury, TATE and Sky Arts. Laurie’s first publication Box Rooms celebrated community and her W10 roots.
This year Laurie was the winner of The Moth Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for The Sylvia Plath, Bridport and Forward Poetry Prize. Her latest books include ‘Makeover’ and ‘Spin’ celebrating the resilience of working class women, autonomy and love.
Vanessa Kisuule
Vanessa Kisuule
Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won over ten slam titles including The Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014 and the Nuoryican Poetry Slam. She has been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Blue Peter, Don’t Flop and TEDx in Vienna. She has appeared at an array of literary and music festivals and was Glastonbury Festival’s Resident Poet in 2019. She has been invited to perform all over the world from Belgium to Brazil to Bangladesh.
Her poem on the historic toppling of Edward Colston’s statue ‘Hollow’ gained over 600,000 views on Twitter in three days. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books and her work was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. She has written for publications including The Guardian, NME and Lonely Planet and has publication credits in pending anthologies with Canongate, Orion and Penguin Random House. She has worked extensively in theatre with Bristol Old Vic, Kneehigh Theatre and Pentabus and her Arts Council supported show ‘SEXY’ toured nationally in 2017. She was the Bristol City Poet for 2018 – 2020 and will be co-tutor for Southbank Centre’s first ever Poetry Collective alongside Will Harris. She is currently working on an essay collection and her debut novel.
Kat Lyons
Kat Lyons
Kat Lyons is a Queer writer, performer, workshop facilitator and creative producer. Their poetry collection Love Beneath the Nails is available from Verve Poetry Press, and they recently finished touring Dry Season, a spoken word theatre show exploring menopause. They are interested in how stories connect us to our world and each other, and in artistic and interdisciplinary collaborations of all kinds. Kat is the current Bristol City Poet (2022-2024).
One of the luxuries that we’ve been afforded by our Arts Council England funding is the ability to professionally capture our events.
Partly because we want to be able to showcase what we do to a wider audience than those experiencing it in real-time. And partly because we want to contribute to archiving the UK’s thriving spoken word poetry scene in the 2020s.
LIVEwire Manchester No.3 highlights
So, above is a highlights video and also some stills, provided by the excellent Josh Hill. Please like the YouTube video and subscribe to our new channel if you fancy more of the same!
And keep your eyes peeled for the announcement of our LIVEwire Manchester No.4 event in June…
As promised, we’re going to be delivering a few small series of poetry writing workshops, alongside our series of live events.
Each led by a different guest facilitator, these sessions will create a safe and supportive space to explore your poetic voice, whether you’re an experienced writer or just want to try something new.
Having first introduced Clevedon and Huddersfield, we’re now introducing a trio of workshops at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery. These are paired with a series of live events that we’re announcing in Manchester.
Poetry writing workshop in Blackburn on Saturday 30 March
The first session takes place from 10am-12pm on Saturday 30 March and will be delivered by Oliver James Lomax. Tickets are available here. They’re Pay As You Feel (£3, £5, £7) and are capped at 12 participants.
Everybody is welcome, but we particularly encourage writers who identify as working-class or as coming from a working-class background.
There’ll also be workshops at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery on Saturday 27 April and Saturday 25 May at the same time, so save those dates if you’re game! Elsewhere, we’ll be announcing a series online.
Oliver James Lomax
Oliver James Lomax
Oliver James Lomax is a poet, educator, and trustee of the Working-Class Movement Library in Salford. He passionately believes in cultural equality and the power of the arts to enable everyone in society to have a voice.
He has published 5 collections of poetry including The Dandelion Clock (2020) and Burial of the Cameo (2023) – ‘Dammed fine poems, full of emotional resonance and vivid imagery; the world made fresh to the eye and ear.’ – Ian Rankin
Oliver has written poetry for film and television and in 2019 released his first spoken word single described by Tom Robinson (BBC 6 Music) as ‘An unholy hybrid of John Cooper Clarke and Mark E Smith.’ He released his debut album Working-Class Love Poem (Shadrack and Duxbury 2023) which he is currently touring across the UK. His poems are now taught in schools and colleges across Manchester.
Poems that dance with originality and are tenderly unafraid of love and belonging.
Mark Thomas
Beautifully written poems from a unique voice of integrity and spirit.
LIVEwire Poetry 