Past Event Status

October 6th, 2022: KIM MOORE

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Kim was born in Leicester and now lives in Cumbria. Her first pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, and went on to be shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award and the Lakeland Book of the Year. Her first full length collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) is currently shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her first non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me was published by Smith/Doorstop in March 2022.

She won an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2015. She won the 2020 Ledbury Poetry Competition and was placed third in the 2021 Mslexia Poetry Competition.

Her work has been translated into many languages as part of the Versopolis project and she was a judge for the 2018 National Poetry Competition and the 2020 Forward Prizes.

She was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Bursary in 2016 to carry out PhD research at Manchester Metropolitan University, and completed her doctorate in ‘Poetry and Everyday Sexism’ at  in March 2020. She now works as a Creative Writing Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

She is the co-director of Kendal Poetry Festival and hosts a monthly reading series for Wordsworth Grasmere as well as running regular writing workshops for young people and adults.

She is a keen runner and plays trumpet in a ten piece soul band and flugel in a local brass band.

See her website at https://www.kimmoorepoet.co.uk/

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June 2nd 2022: Zoom Guest Evening – JAMES SALE and ANTHONY WATTS

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We are delighted to invite James and Anthony to this FRP Zoom event.

James Sale lives in Bournemouth and is a management consultant, educator and poet who has had over 50 books published, most recently, “Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams” (Routledge, 2021). He has been nominated by The Hong Kong Review for the 2022 Pushcart Prize for poetry, has won first prize in New York’s The Society of Classical Poets 2017 annual competition, and performed in New York in 2019. He is a regular contributor on poetry and culture for New York’s The Epoch Times. His most recent poetry collection is “HellWard”, which has led one reviewer to describe him as “England’s epic poet” and another to describe the poem as like “thriller fiction, especially Lee Child, that has me desperately keen to turn to the next page to see what happens next.” Finally, Anthony Watts remarked that “HellWard is like no other book you have ever read – unless, that is, you’ve read the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, on which it is modelled.”
For more information about the author, and about his Dante project, visit https://englishcantos.home.blog

A Londoner by birth, Anthony Watts has lived in rural Somerset for most of his life, its varying terrains – the Quantock Hills, the Levels – informing much of his work.  Upon his retirement from local government in 2003 he held the distinction of being Somerset County Library’s longest-serving member.  Anthony is a founder member of the Fire River Poets, at whose monthly open mics he is a regular participant.  He has won 26 First Prizes in poetry competitions and was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2014.  His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies.  His first collection, Strange Gold, was published by the mysteriously named KQBX Press, edited by fellow poet James Sale, with whom he will be sharing the guest spot on 2nd June. 

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May 5th 2022: Zoom Guest Evening – DAVID MORLEY

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Biographical note

David Morley’s latest book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His other books from Carcanet Press include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year. David pioneered podcasting in creative writing through his Slow Poetry and Writing Challenges spoken word projects. He is a professor at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Publisher details at Carcanet
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784109905

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March 3rd 2022: Zoom Guest Evening – KATIE GRIFFITHS

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Katie Griffiths grew up in Ottawa, Canada, in a family from Northern Ireland.

She came second in 2018’s National Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet, My Shrink is Pregnant, was a winner in Live Canon’s 2019 pamphlet competition. She was published in Primers Volume One by Nine Arches Press, and her first full-length collection, The Attitudes, came out in 2021, also from Nine Arches. 

A member of the two poetry groups Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and Red Door Poets, Katie is also singer-songwriter in the band A Woman in Goggles.

Click here to read transcript of interview with Katie by FRP member Annie Fisher

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February 17th 2022: Zoom Guest Evening – JACQUELINE SAPHRA

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*Please note change of date*

Jacqueline is a poet, playwright and teacher. Recent collections are All My Mad Mothers, shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot prize and Dad, Remember You are Dead (2019), both from Nine Arches Press. A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller (2017) and Veritas: Poems after Artemisia (2020) were published by Hercules Editions.
Her most recent play, The Noises was nominated for a Standing Ovation Award. One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets was published by Nine Arches Press in 2021.
She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet a teaches and mentors for The Poetry School.

Do also read Jacqueline’s Interview with FRP Member Graeme Ryan (Link)

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Guest Poets: Andy Brown and Marc Woodward – November 4th, 2021

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Please Note, this is now a ZOOM EVENT
REGISTER HERE

We look forward to hearing works from Andy Brown and Marc Woodward at this event.  They will be reading from ‘The Tin Lodes‘, a jointly written book of poems. 

Andy Brown is professor of English, Creative Writing and Poetry at Exeter University and an internationally known poet with many published collections. 
Marc Woodward is a widely published poet as well as a highly regarded musician who has performed and taught internationally.

They recently collaborated on The Tin Lodes – a full length poetry collection exploring the relationship between man and nature in the West Country via environmental, archaeological, and human  themes. This was published in 2020 by Indigo Dreams. It was reviewed in the American online zine Quill & Parchment:

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Guest Poets: Sheila Aldous & Pratibha Castle – October 7th, 2021

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Sheila Aldous

For Sheila, as for many, poetry is a personal journey and she has experienced highs and lows while learning through life to ‘get back up again’. 
After a career with several newspapers from Liverpool to Bermuda, and in London at the Radio Times, a new journey of discovery opened up. Sheila gained a BA Honours at Anglia Polytechnic University, and an MA in Creative Writing from Exeter University.

Prathiba Castle

Pratibha, at various times a holistic therapist and workshop facilitator, singer, hippy, was born in Dublin and now lives in West Sussex. Though she received some acclaim as a writer at the age of nine, winning a Cadbury’s essay competition, also writing, directing and acting in a school play aged ten, she only turned to writing as an adult aged 60, prompted by her mother’s death.
She graduated from Chichester University with a first-class honours degree in English and Creative Writing, studying further on their Creative Writing MA.

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