Videos
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 19th April 2023
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Naomi Foyle
Words Out Loud Present Featured Reader Naomi Foyle
June 2023
Naomi Foyle is an award-winning British-Canadian poet, essayist and science fiction novelist. Her three poetry collections include The Night Pavilion, an Autumn 2008 PBS Recommendation, The World Cup (2010) and Adamantine (US/UK), which contains poems reflecting on international feminist icons, Israel-Palestine, and her own breast cancer treatment in 2016-17. Her fourth collection, Salt & Snow, and eleventh pamphlet, Alphapelago, are forthcoming in 2023. Active in the British small press scene, Naomi is the Deputy Director of Waterloo Press, and the editor of many single authored volumes and the anthology A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry (Smokestack Books, 2017). She has read her own work in venues from Babylon to Berlin to Vancouver Island. As Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing at the University of Chichester, and a longtime denizen of Brighton, her Words Out Loud reading is closer to home! https://www.naomifoyle.com
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 19th April 2023
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Bob Renard
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Bob Renard and Open-Mic to follow.
April 2023
Bob has self-published 6 books of poetry, and will share a selection of his work with us this evening.
A retired Psychiatric Social Worker, he lives in a beautiful part of rural Oregon, USA, and in addition to writing poetry and being active in his local writers and poetry groups, now has the time to enjoy his wide range of other interests.
He is a keen gardener, plays golf, makes and sells driftwood birdhouses and plays the soprano and baritone saxophone. As if that wasn’t enough, he has recently purchased a 13ft sail boat and is looking forward to taking to the water on the lakes in spring.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 15th March 2023
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Mandy Pannett
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Mandy Pannett and Open-Mic to follow.
March 2023
Mandy Pannett lives in West Sussex. She taught children with special needs for many years but now works freelance as a creative writing tutor for adults.
Her poetry pamphlet ‘The Daedalus Files’ was published by SPM Publications in 2021. Five poetry collections have been previously published: ‘Bee Purple’ and ‘Frost Hollow’ (Oversteps Books), ‘Allotments in the Orbital’ (Searle Publishing), ‘All the Invisibles’ (SPM Publications), ‘Jongleur in the Courtyard’ (Indigo Dreams Publishing). A selection of her poems, ‘Ladders of Glass’, was issued by Integral Contemporary Literature Press with English and Romanian parallel texts.
She enjoys writing short fiction as well and two years ago won a national competition for Vignette writing. She has also judged competitions for Flash Fiction. Two novellas have been published by Independent Presses: ‘The Onion Stone’ (Pewter Rose Press) and ‘The Wulf Enigma’ (Circaidy Gregory Press).
Mandy was also poetry editor for five years for Sentinel Literary Quarterly and has edited anthologies and poetry collections for them and for Earlyworks Press. She has acted as an adjudicator for national competitions and won prizes and been placed herself in several others.
She is currently working on a music/poetry/ art/ film collaboration inspired by the South Downs.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 18th January 2023
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Britta Benson
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Britta Benson and Open-Mic to follow.
Jan 2023
Britta is based in Cumbernauld near Glasgow and is gathering a collection, In Life, for publication soon. She is a circus skills instructing German, a writer, performer and linguist thriving in Scotland, her chosen habitat since the year 2000. She publishes a daily blog, ‘Britta’s Blog – Letters from Scotland’. She also teaches Gaelic and runs an online creative writing group, The Procrastinators.
Britta’s Scotland for beginners may be found here: https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/your-stories/scotlands-stories-2022/scotland-for-beginners
And find “Mum’s Shoes” here: https://soundcloud.com/scottishbooktrust/mums-shoes-a-celebration-by
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 21st Dec 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Peg Quinn
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Peg Quinn and Open-Mic to follow.
Dec 2022
Peg Quinn grew up in rural Nebraska. She has a B.F.A. in Education from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut book of poetry, Mother Lode, was published by Gunpowder Press in 2021.Having lived forty-four years in Santa Barbara, California, she recently returned to Nebraska where she is an education professional, visual artist and award-winning quilter.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 16th Nov 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: CW Blackburn
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader C.W. Blackburn and Open-Mic to follow. Join us to hear original writing, out loud.
Nov 2022
C.W. Blackburn is a mystic poet who released his first collection, ‘Where Words Are Yet To Be Spoken: Poems for Presence’, at the beginning of 2022. Steeped in spirituality and the poetic tradition, his work navigates the space between darkness and light – vulnerability and power – with a unique and diverse voice and flow, and an authentic sensitivity. He followed up his first collection with ‘Disorder: 23 Poems About Mental Health’ in March – a volume evoking his experiences with OCD and anxiety – and ‘One Hundred Colours of Being: Poems in the Spirit of Zen’ in September – a collection of short poems based on the form of Japanese tanka. He’s concluding his first year of self-publishing in November with ‘The Gospel of Silence: Poems for the Living One’, a collection based around the concept of spiritual rebirth and the Second Coming. He self-publishes under his printing label, Sundara Poetry Press, and his books are available to buy in paperback through all Amazon sites worldwide.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 19th Oct 2022
Featured Readers: The Polish Poets + Open-Mic on Zoom and in Chichester
Words Out Loud present Featured Readers: The Polish Poets + Open-Mic on Zoom and in Chichester.
Oct 2022
Recorded live on 19th Oct, 2022
We are delighted to present poems by a number of well-known and respected poets of Polish origin, writing in or translated into English, some of whom are based in Poland and some in England and the United States.
Original Event Listing https://wordsoutloud.org.uk/event/featured-readers-the-polish-poets-open-mic-on-zoom-and-in-chichester
This continues the somewhat cosmopolitan nature of our Zoom events and allows us once again to share our creative work with writers from across the world!
Polish/English translator Anna Widlarz has collaborated with Words Out Loud to organise and host this special event and will be introducing the Polish Poets and translating some of the poems on the evening.
Anna Widlarz
English to Polish and Polish to English translator, holding an MA Diploma in English Studies (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) and specialising in poetry translation. A poet herself. She has co-authored and co-hosted a radio programme on the latest Polish poetry and co-hosted two other bilingual (Polish-English) radio programmes about music and poetry. She also worked as an interpreter and journalist writing a column about poetry translation. https://www.facebook.com/Przekladpoezji
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 21st Sept 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Fiona Robertson
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Fiona Robertson and Open-Mic to follow. Join us to hear original writing, out loud.
Sept 2022
Fiona Robertson is a facilitator of embodied inquiry who has been exploring inner and outer realms for many years. She journeys with people – many of whom are going through a dark night of the soul – into their interior landscape, accompanying them as they discover aspects of themselves and life that have previously been hidden. She is the author of The Dark Night of the Soul: A Journey from Absence to Presence. She lives in Nottingham but loves the Hebrides, and is an occasional poet.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 17th Aug 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Geoffrey Winch
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Geoffrey Winch and Open-Mic to follow. Join us to hear original writing, out loud.
Aug 2022
Geoffrey Winch was born in Reading, Berkshire, in 1943 where he was raised, educated, and first worked as a cartographer. Subsequently he was employed as a land surveyor and highway engineer in Hampshire, Warwickshire and, finally, in West Sussex where he is now retired. He and his wife live in Felpham.
His poetry was first published in 1992, and has since appeared regularly in a wide range of small press publications in the UK, US and online. He was awarded the accolade of ‘The UK’s Best Small Press Poet’ in 2011 by Purple Patch magazine, and in 2020 his poem ‘Shock in the Dark’ was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
He is, and has been, a member of several creative writing groups within the county, and has devised and led poetry workshops for some of them. For more than a decade he has participated regularly in the Chichester Open Mic.
He has published three pamphlet collections – the most recent being West Abutment Mirror Images (Original Plus, 2017); and three full collections – most recently Velocities and Drifts of Winds (Dempsey and Windle, 2020).
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 20th July 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Marsha de la O
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Marsha de la O and Open-Mic to follow. Join us to hear original writing, out loud.
July 2022
Marsha de la O is the author of three books. Her most recent book, Every Ravening Thing, came out from Pitt Poetry Series in 2019, published through the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous book, Antidote for Night, won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award and was published by BOA Editions. Her first book, Black Hope, was awarded the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and was published by New Issues Press, Western Michigan University. Black Hope won an Editors’ Choice, Small Press Book Award.
De La O worked as a bilingual teacher in Los Angeles and the rural community of Santa Paula for more than twenty-five years. She studied Spanish in Morelia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and lived for two years in Spain where she worked in a dual-immersion school. She now lives in Ventura, California, with her husband, poetry host and Ventura County Poet Laureate Emeritus, Phil Taggart. Together, they produce poetry readings and events in Ventura County and edit the literary journal Spillway.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 15th June 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Hugh Dunkerley
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Hugh Dunkerley and Open-Mic to follow. Join us to hear original writing, out loud.
June 2022
I have published two collections, Hare and Kin, both with Cinnamon Press. I often write about our relationship with what the philosopher David Abram calls ‘the more-than-human world’, with which we are inextricably bound. I teach at the University of Chichester, where I run the MA in Creative Writing.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 18th May 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Chris Buckley
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Christopher Buckley and Open-Mic to follow. Join us to hear original writing, out loud.
May 2022
Poet and editor Christopher Buckley earned his BA from St. Mary’s College, MA from San Diego State University, and MFA from the University of California-Irvine. He is the author of over twenty collections of poetry, including most recently Modern History (2008), Rolling the Bones (2010), White Shirt (2011), Back Room as the Philosopher’s Club (2014), and Star Journal: Selected Poems (2016). With Gary Young he has edited the anthologies The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place (1999), Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poetry and Poetics from California (2008), and One for the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form (2013). With Christopher Howell, Buckley edited the volume Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees (2011).
Buckley has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Award to Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, the Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award, and the James Dickey Prize. He is professor emeritus at the University of California-Riverside.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 16th Mar 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Chris Hardy
Words Out Loud present Featured Reader Chris Hardy and Open-Mic to follow. Join us to hear original writing, out loud.
Chris Hardy’s poetry has appeared widely in magazines and online and his new collection ‘Key to the Highway’ has just been published by Shoestring Press. Chris is in LiTTLe MACHiNe, performing their settings of famous poems.
‘The greatest poetry & music band in the world’
(Carol Ann Duffy)
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 16th Feb 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Jane Metcalfe
Jane began her working life in a variety of jobs, as a night-club hostess, antiquarian bookseller and record shop assistant, before discovering she could sing. After studying at the Royal College of Music, Jane pursued a successful career as an Opera singer and recitalist, notably as a soloist with the D’Oyly Carte Opera as well as major opera houses in the UK. She taught singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for a number of years working with students of drama, music therapy and performance and communication skills.
After gaining an MA in Creative Writing from Sussex University, Jane went on to facilitate numerous creative reminiscence projects in East Sussex as both writer and community workshop leader. She has written plays and monologues that have been performed and led writing workshops. Jane was commissioned to write a poem for Where the Wild Flowers Are, a project hosted by The City of London Festival, 2012. Her poetry has appeared in various publications and she has had modest successes in poetry competitions. A trio of poems celebrating life after cancer have been set to music by British composer Jonathan Dove. She is the author of Things in Heaven and Earth, a true story of love, mystery and transformation: an intriguing account of an intense and secret affair between a British dramatist and a legendary Hollywood actress.
Jane has one son and currently lives opposite the sea in St Leonards on Sea, where she teaches singing, runs The ParkinSongsters, a choir she founded for people with Parkinson’s, and writes.
On Zoom
Date of Live Meeting: Wed 19th Jan, 2022
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Stephanie Norgate
Stephanie Norgate is a poet and playwright. Her plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. For many years, she ran the MA in Creative Writing at Chichester University and is now a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She edited an international collection of essays, Poetry and Voice (CSP, 2012) and Winchester Poetry Festival’s Chalk Poets Anthology (Sarsen Press, 2015). In 2016, she completed a study of poetry trails for South Downs National Park. As a translator, she has contributed to Modern Poetry in Translation and the MPT anthology, Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe Books/MPT, 2016). Her chapter about the imagery of the house in her poetry appears in Architectural Space and the Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Her three collections of poetry with Bloodaxe are Hidden River (2008), which was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, The Blue Den (2012) and The Conversation (2021).
FESTIVE OPEN MIC
Date of Live Meeting: 15th Dec, 2021
Our Festive Open-Mic. We didn’t have a featured reader for this event, so some of us brought along some extras to read to light up the dark night!
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Christine Rowlands
Date of Live Meeting: 17th Nov, 2021
Christine trained as an embroidery teacher and worked in an FE College as a special needs teacher working with adult learners. She has also worked in libraries, for The Lady newspaper and The Daily Telegraph. She currently leads Art workshops for older people at Christ Church Chichester while continuing to enjoy reading and writing poetry.
Featured Reader & Open Mic: Piers Rowlandson
Date of Live Meeting: 2oth Oct, 2021
Piers Rowlandson
Piers is a regular at our Open Mic events on Zoom and in person at Wagtail. He has been writing poetry for pleasure for many years and has also recently published several collections of his work.
Recorded Live – Featured Reader Jen Kelley
Zoom Open Mic – Sept 2021
Jen Kelley
Chichester Zooms
Wednesday 15th September, 2021 at 6:30pm
Jennifer is a poet, fiction, and non-fiction writer living in Ventura, CA. She graduated from California State University, Channel Islands in 2017, with a degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing.
Most recently she is being published in the 2020/2021 edition of Spillway. She was included in the anthology Psalms of Cinder and Silt, published as Solo Novo: volume 7/8. Two of her poems were published in the chapbook Love Letters to the Recently Departed in 2018. She has been published twice in the ASKEW literary journal, in 2015 and 2017. Her ekphrastic works were included in Kevin Sloan’s Exhibition, A Collection of Rarities at the California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks. Most recently, she has begun writing blogs for Off Main: the Ventura County Poetry Project.
She has appeared as the featured poet in the Loose Lips, series in Malibu and throughout Ventura County, including Jackson Wheeler’s Arcade Poetry Series in 2015 and 2016. A regular performer at John M. White’s performance series 5X5X5 in the last three years, Jennifer loves the energy of a live audience.
For her growth as a poet and her opportunities, to present her work, she entirely blames her poetry family at Phil Taggart’s Thursday Night Poetry, at EP Foster library.
Her chapbook, These Things Remain was published in 2005 and she is currently looking for a publisher for her full-length collection, Coming in from the Wild.
She is recently completed a fantasy trilogy, The Founders, and begun work on the futuristic corporate thriller The Vampire Hunters.
Phil Taggart
Chichester Zooms
Wednesday 18th August, 2021 at 6:30pm
Phil Taggart has three collections of poetry. Rick Sings, Opium Wars and an art book with artist Ann Harithas, Cowboy Collages. He has been a poetry editor for over twenty years for Art Life limited edition, and with Marsha de la O, the Askew Poetry Journal and Spillway.
Phil has taught poetry workshops at Cal Lutheran, University of Pittsburg, local high schools, CAPS Media and elementary schools. He teaches Broadcast Digital Media at El Camino High School at Ventura College
Phil has run and supported poetry readings in Ventura County and Santa Barbara since 1991. He presently hosts a weekly poetry reading at the EP Foster Library in Ventura.
Sue Shattock
Chichester Zooms
Wednesday 21st July, 2021 at 6:30pm
Sue describes herself as an “accidental” writer and new poet. She wrote a script for fun one sunny bank holiday weekend in 1990. As a stage-manager on the long running police TV drama “The Bill”, she gave the script to a colleague who passed it to one of the shows editors and Sue was “discovered” as a writer – as much to her surprise as everyone else’s!
After stepping away from professional writing, Sue became a complementary colour therapistteacher and is a marriage registrar in Chichester. Her love of dialogue, the rhyme and rhythm of words was re-ignited quite recently and she enjoys creating monologues, plays and poetry for performance and entertainment.
Nigel Millet
Chichester Zooms
Wednesday 16th June, 2021 at 6:30pm
Nigel now enjoys life in abundance, having moved to Chichester five years ago and living with his partner Sarah.
During his professional life he had several career changes all in pursuit of life’s adventures & betterment, working overseas and in the UK.
He has always been very fond of the arts and over the years written several poems for fun and for love, only recently deciding to compile a small collection of his words and thoughts in the form of a book , now working on a follow up.
Mike Jenkins
Chichester Zooms
Wednesday 19th May, 2021 at 6:30pm
Mike has been writing poems since the angst ridden age of 16 when they were then mostly all about figuring out why falling in love with people hurt so much.
Since then he has worked as an actor, a customer service coach, a teacher and a web designer. Mike also leads groups in meditation practice. He is currenlty editing a collection of his poems for publication.
Tina McNaughton
Chichester Zooms
Wednesday 21st April, 2021 at 6:30pm
Tina divides her time between Crowthorne, Berkshire and her home city, Portsmouth. Tina is married and has three sons. She started life as a linguist, has a literature background and has worked as a teacher. Tina now works as an acupuncturist and has her own clinic in Crowthorne.
She also has a professional writing services company, WriteRhymes, which produces bespoke celebration poetry on commission. Tina is passionate about poetry and finds reading and writing it therapeutic, uplifting and calming. When she wants to relax she walks, cycles, dances and practices yoga. And reads more poetry.