Teignmouth Poetry Festival 2024 - Saturday
Event details
- Event times:
- Start : 10.30am
Ten years on and Poetry Teignmouth is thriving. Our original aims are unchanged – to encourage local poets in their writing and introduce the most respected names in the poetry world to a wider public.
Poetry Workshop with Rosie Jackson, 10.30am £15.00
REVERSALS AND REPETITIONS
Inspired by prompts from poets as diverse as Kim Moore, Clare Shaw, Ocean Vuong, Benjamin Zephaniah and others, this workshop will explore and practise how to use changes of direction (the volta), as well as unifying rhythms of repetition (anaphora) to make your poems more dynamic, memorable and unpredictable. Rosie Jackson lives in Teignmouth. Widely published and commended in the National Poetry Competition 2022, her latest collection is Love Leans over the Table (2023). ‘a rare poet of transcendence’ Bel Mooney.
10.30am - 1pm
Poetry Open Mic, 2.00pm FREE ticket required
No advance booking – first come, first served. A chance to present your latest and finest to a friendly festival audience. Specially welcome will be poets who are visiting Teignmouth from elsewhere. Precise format and length of reading slots will depend upon numbers taking part.
MC Marc Woodward
Poetry reading - Grizel Luttman-Johnson and Graeme Ryan, 3.30pm £5.00
Grizel Luttman-Johnson grew up in Scotland with a lot of sheep and hills and praying. Now in Hartland she has swapped the sheep for bees, the hills for sea, and the prayer for breath. She remains an unrelenting artist, yogi and unschooled poet. She was amazed and delighted to win the Graham Burchell Award for Devon Poets in 2023.
Graeme Ryan, born in St Anne's on Sea, Lancashire. Graeme taught English and Drama in the SW for many years, and is author of seven full-length plays for young people including Heartland, Hope Street and Tracks of the Free. He won the Teignmouth Festival Open Poetry prize in 2018 and collaborated in The Poetry of Unknown Things in 2023. He is a co-chair of Fire River Poets based in Somerset and has read widely across the SW, most recently at Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey. His debut poetry collection Valley of the Kings was published in 2022.
1hr
Competition Prizegiving, 5.30pm FREE ticket required
The top 6 successful poets in each category of the Teignmouth Poetry Festival Competition will read their poems and there’ll be adjudications from Open judge Malika Booker and Graeme Ryan, judge for the Graham Burchell Award for Devon Poets. Followed by prize presentations introduced by Virginia Griem and Ian Royce Chamberlain.
Poetry Reading Malika Booker, 8.00pm £10.00
Malika Booker is a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. She co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire, Malika is published in the Penguin Modern Poets Series 3, Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, she was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for her outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow in 2022. Malika is the first woman to win the Forward Prize Best Single Poem twice, first in 2020 with her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75 (2019), and in 2023 with Libation, published in The Poetry Review (2022).
