Dawn Gorman is an award-winning poet, arts practitioner and journalist, and has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University.
She strongly believes in poetry as a participatory and collaborative medium, and accordingly uses it as an interactive tool with everyone from people with memory loss issues, to school children. She is passionate about the cross-pollination of different strands of the arts, and has worked on projects with The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who, in 2015, together with composer James Redwood, and 250 school children, devised a symphony based on her poem Replenishment. The overture for that symphony was devised as a film poem by Daniel Thomason and Ollie Brown, and was chosen to feature at the Cannes Short Film Festival 2015.
Dawn was poet in residence at the five-star-reviewed art installation Unexpected Excesses at Edinburgh Fringe 2015, in which she collaborated with sculptor and artist Liz Watts, textile designer Jan Knibbs, and various musicians and wordsmiths. She is currently poet in residence at the Greenhill Cottage Gallery in Southwick, Wiltshire.
Dawn runs the hugely popular Words & Ears poems-and-a-pint night, which takes place monthly, with a high-profile guest poet and open mic slots, in The Swan Hotel in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire. She also works closely with the annual Arts Festival and Fringe Festival in the town, devising and organising literature-based events and workshops (for the Arts Festival events, she received the support of an Arts Council grant in 2015). To coincide with the festivals, she runs international poetry competitions - in 2014, she devised and organised the immensely successful Poems-on-a-Beermat competition, which will run again in 2016.
She has performed on radio, and has read her work around the world: at Poets House in New York, where her second pamphlet, This Meeting of Tracks, was launched by Toadlily Press as part of Mend & Hone, its 2013 four-hander; at Lauderdale House in Islington, for the London launch of The Book of Love & Loss, (Belgrave Press) alongside poets including Wendy Cope and Mimi Khalvati; at Shakespeare & Co in Paris, at the Guildhall in Bath as part of the Bath Literature Festival, in libraries, pubs, bookshops, cafes, village halls and stately homes - and at countless poems and pints nights.
