Dawn Gorman believes poetry should be everywhere - puts it on beermats,
uses it to
work with people with memory loss, facilitates writing workshops,
organises poetry
events and runs international poetry competitions. She is
widely published, and has
performed in New York, Paris, London - and lots of
smaller places in between.
“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket;
you put
your life into it and make something out of that.”
Mary Oliver
Guest Poet: Clare Best
Clare Best's first full poetry collection, Excisions, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless and CELL. Springlines, her eco-project with painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis, explored mysterious bodies of water in southern England. Clare's prose memoir The Missing List (Linen Press 2018) was described by Andrew O'Hagan as 'brightly coloured, beautifully orchestrated, emotionally pure'. Her most recent poetry collection is Each Other (Waterloo Press 2019). Clare lives near the Suffolk coast. www.clarebest.co.uk
Guest Poet: Robert Hamberger
Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes, appearing in the Forward Book of Poetry 2020. He has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and featured on the Guardian Poem of the Week website. He won first prize in Chroma's International Queer Writing competition, and has appeared in various British, American and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections, including Blue Wallpaper (2019) from Waterloo Press. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road will be published by John Murray in 2020.