Jenny Mitchell is the Inaugural Poet-in-the-Community at the British Library working with the Engagement Team. She’s been nominated as Best of the Net 2025, won the Ink, Sweat and Tears May 2024 Poetry Competition, the Shooter Poetry Competition in 2023, the Gregory O’Donoghue Prize in 2022 and the Poetry Book Awards in 2021 for her second collection, Map of a Plantation (on the syllabus at Manchester Metropolitan University). The prize-winning debut collection, Her Lost Language, is One of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 (Poetry Wales), and her latest collection, Resurrection of a Black Man, contains three prize-winning poems and is featured on the US podcast Poetry Unbound.

Her poetic tribute to Benjamin Zephaniah, The Day Mr Zephaniah Died, is on the British Literature syllabus at the University of Connecticut, and she has performed at the Houses of Parliament. She was Poet-in-residence at Sussex University in 2024 where her poem ‘Nots Inside the Library’ is on permanent display.

She has a podcast Behind The Glass: A Parsonage Podcast (Bronte Parsonage Museum)

Agent: Crystal Mahey-Morgan at OWN IT! https://ownit.london/
Social media: X: @JennyMitchellGo

We are delighted to invite Joelle Taylor to this FRP Zoom event.

Joelle Taylor biography

Joelle Taylor is the author of four collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a cocurator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet will be published by Riverrun in Spring of 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. Her most recent acting role was in Blue by Derek Jarman, which was directed by Neil Bartlett and featured Russell Tovey, Jay Bernard, and Travis Alabanza. Blue sold out its run across the UK and more dates are expected for the future.

Where the Spirit Takes You – An evening with Fire River Poets

Venue: Brendon Books, Bath Place, Taunton TA1 4ER

Tickets £5 from Brendon Books
Box Office: 01823 337742 , or click here for online booking 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we first started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot   Four Quartets

Welcome to an exciting evening of new poetry read by Taunton’s longest-established, highly acclaimed poetry group, Fire River Poets.
With a dozen distinct and outstanding poetic voices – and a wealth of national publication and competition success between them – this high quality, entertaining evening of original verse explores the themes of journeys, homecoming and what it might mean to fully belong on this earth.

Website: Taunton Literary Festival 2024

We are delighted to invite Rob Hamberger to this FRP Zoom event.

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 won The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023. His poetry has featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. An Arvon tutor, he has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His fifth collection Nude Against A Rock is forthcoming from Waterloo Press, to be published in autumn 2024. His website is www.roberthamberger.co.uk

We are delighted to invite Carrie Etter to this FRP Zoom event.

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published four collections of poetry, and her fifth, Grief’s Alphabet, was published by Seren Books in April 2024. Her first book, The Tethers (Seren, 2009), won the London New Poetry Prize, her third, Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and her fourth, The Weather in Normal (Seren, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The TLS, and many other journals and anthologies internationally. She is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol and also writes short fiction, essays, and reviews. 

This is an evening where we offer the opportunity to many poets to read and share their work.
Slots are normally set at 5 minutes per person.
Please use the online Registration Form to join us for this event.

We are delighted to invite Phil Kirby to this FRP Zoom event.

Phil worked in the family business as a carpenter and joiner before studying to become an English teacher. He began writing after reading Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ in a school anthology, and started placing poetry in journals and magazines in the early 90s. In 1994 he left teaching – briefly – and promptly won an East Midlands Arts writer’s bursary and a place on their prestigious ‘New Voices’ reading tour.

During this period, he ran Waldean Press, publishing pamphlets by the likes of Martin Stannard, Amanda Dalton, Pam Thompson and Michael Bartholomew-Biggs. Consequently, Waldean Press also received recognition and support from East Midlands Arts.

In addition, Phil has taught many adult writing classes through the WEA, conducted residencies in a secondary school and a hospice and judged competitions.

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We are delighted to invite Julie Sampson and Michellle Diaz to this FRP Zoom event.

Julie Sampson’s work is widely published in magazines and anthologies, and has been shortlisted, or highly commended in a variety of competitions (including Survision, James Tate Memorial Prize and Geoff Steven’s Memorial Poetry Prize).
She edited Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2009) and has three collections: Tessitura (Shearsman, 2011); It was when it was when it was (Dempsey and Windle, 2018); and Fivestones (Lapwing publications, 2022).
Julie has a PhD on writer H.D. (Exeter University, 1997). She researches the history of Devon’s women writers and is preparing publication of a non-fiction book as well as follow up collection to Fivestones, focused on Devon landscapes and family history.

Michelle Diaz lives in Glastonbury. She was made Chaired Bard of Ynis Witrin in 2022 – The Jubilee year. This meant lots of civic and poetic responsibilities.
She has been published in numerous journals, both online and in print ie Candlestick Press, Under the Radar and 14 Magazine. 
She was recently nominated for the Forward prize in the Single Poem category.
Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dancing Boy’ was published in 2019 by Against the Grain.
She is working on her first full collection.

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Many of Genista’s poems gain something by being read aloud, so as a former actor, she has enjoyed reading her work either solo, or with other members of the Fire River Poetry group in several venues. They include the Exeter Arts Centre (now The Phoenix), Dartington Literature Festival, Wells Literary Festival, The Plough Arts Centre, Black Torrington and others further afield.  Genista has read at monthly readings for many years with the Fire River Poetry Group and guest poets at the Brewhouse Theatre from 2011 and following on from there at the Creative Innovation Centre (CICIC) in Taunton until 2021.  These readings continue on Zoom for the present.

Recent publications: The Page is Printed (Tacchi Morris Arts Centre) for prize winning poems in 2014 and 2015   The Ver Prize shortlist 2014.  Shortlisted for the Wells Festival of Literature in 2014 –  judged by Andrew Motion.
Her first collection, Cat’s Cradle, was published in 2007 by Oversteps Press.

Tonight, Genista will be reading from her second collection, Tightrope (Elms Publishing March 2024).

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We are delighted to invite Luke Kennard to this FRP Zoom event. .

Luke Kennard is a poet and novelist and professor of creative writing at the University of Birmingham. His 6th poetry collection, Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward Prize in 2021. His work focuses on absurdism, theology, the prose poem and hybrid texts. He is currently working on a poetry collection based on the Book of Jonah as a follow-up to Cain (2016). 

Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex.

His second full collection is
Whatever You Do, Just Don’t
(HappenStance Press, 2023).

‘These poems refuse to be pigeon-holed. Whatever they focus on – matters of the heart, football, the post-Brexit marketplace – their method is concise and yet searching, serious but playful. Their language is (mainly) English, their standpoint European.
By day, Matthew Stewart is involved in the Spanish wine trade. But his commitment to poetry is just as intense. Line by line, he weighs the risks, invests meticulous skill, and finally invites the trust on which everything else depends. He promises much – and he delivers.’

Sean O’Brien’s eleventh book of poems, Embark, appeared in 2022. His work has received awards including the Somerset Maugham, the E.M Forster, the Forward Prize (three times), the T.S. Eliot prize, and most recently the Beijing Literature and Arts Network Award for lifetime achievement. His work has been widely translated. Among his own translations are Dante’s Inferno and the poems of the Kazakh national poet Abai Kunanbayuli. In 2023 his chapbook Impasse: for Jules Maigret was published by Hercules Editions and his pamphlet Otherwise by Dare-Gale Press. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Derek Sellen has been writing poetry, stories and plays over many years. He has read his work widely, in the UK, Italy, Germany, Russia (in better times) and Ireland and has won various poetry awards, including Poets Meet Politics and Poets Meet Painters. He has twice won the O’Bheal Five Words and also twice won the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year international competition. His poems have been placed or highly commended in the Plough Poetry Competition, Richmond Arts, Sentinel and many other competitions.

His collection of poems inspired by Spanish art The Other Guernica (Cultured Llama 2018) was a finalist in the Poetry Book Award 2020 and was very positively reviewed in Poetry Salzburg, London Grip and other places. His first collection was The Arch and its Shadow (2009). His work has been widely published in anthologies, online, and in magazines.

Timothy Adès is a rhyming translator-poet, with books by Victor Hugo, Robert Desnos, Jean Cassou, Alfonso Reyes, and awards for these poets; a Venezuelan book, a Greek booklet, and three German books coming soon, one to follow. He rewrote Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets without using letter E. He translated Benjamin Britten’s chosen texts from Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’ to fit the music. He runs a bookstall of translated poetry. He is in magazines, on Facebook and YouTube, and his website is http://www.timothyades.com .

Mark Haworth-Booth read English at Cambridge and art history at Edinburgh. He worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum as a specialist in design and history of photography. He moved to North Devon in 2009 and is a Green Party member of North Devon Council. He has published two books of poems – Wild Track (2005) and The Thermobaric Playground (2022). 

Mary Anne Smith Sellen’s work has been recognised in both national and international poetry competitions. She has been widely published, in magazines, anthologies and online, including Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Grey Hen Press, Confluence, Dream Catcher, Beautiful Dragons and Wildfire Words. She has recently completed the manuscript for her first full poetry collection and is currently working on ideas for a new pamphlet. She is a regular reader at events and festivals.

Do check out these three Poetry Events (below) at Taunton Literary Festival (BrendonBooks)

Tue 14 Nov 2023, 7 PM
An Evening With the Fire River Poets – The Thought of the Heart – Tickets £5

Sat 18 Nov 2023, 7 PM
Readings from Three Live Canon Poetry Competition Winners: Josephine Corcoran, Matt Bryden and Isabella Mead – Tickets £5

Tue 21 November 2023, 6.30 PM
Kalevala – Land of Heroes with Graham Fawcett – Tickets £12.50

Tickets can be obtained from: Brendon Books, Bath Place, Taunton TA1 4ER, Tel: 01823 337742, email brendonbooks@gmail.com
Or online directly from  TicketSource

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We regretfully announce the death of our friend and former FRP member, Derek Power, who died in Musgrove on Monday 9^th October, following surgery on his hip.

Derek was born in Oldham in 1932, but later moved to Falmouth, where he lived for fifteen years.  Whilst there, he joined Falmouth Poetry Group and became Chairman and Secretary.  Other members of that group, whom Derek got to know include such well-known names as Penelope Shuttle, Peter Redgrove and future Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.  Later, he moved to Taunton, where he worked as a pharmacist until his retirement.  Derek joined the Fire River Poets in 1989.  At that time and for some time after, the group was meeting at a series of venues, none of them ideal, until Derek took pity on us and offered his home.  From then on, for many years, he and his wife Eileen hosted our meetings and always made us most welcome (drinks were free, until we insisted on leaving a monetary contribution on the table).  We continued to enjoy Derek’s hospitality until early in 2017, when Eileen’s ill health and other factors made it impractical.

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