Next Week I'm Co-headlining Stonefest. I will be launching this little booklet on the night. It's full of poems about phones and social media and it looks like a phone, with illustrations throughout like layers of phone peeling away as pages. It'll be on sale for £3 alongside my book The Africa In My House £6.
This is how it went when I gave 90 poems to my mentor, Matt Black, to see what he thought of them. The comments that came back were incredibly supportive and affirming. I was over the moon to read the text I got saying Matt was really enjoying my poems, but by the time it came to getting my book back, I wasn't as delighted as I thought I'd be... I'd assumed part of my reason for giving those poems up for criticism was my need for affirmation - my insecurity about whether I am any good as a writer. Maybe I didn't need that as much as I thought? Unlikely!! I think it was this... having been told I'd got enough good poems to go after a collection, I realised I need to do that - go after it. I n
Thrilled to have a short story in this issue of Paper and Ink. Buy a copy now on Etsy!
Had a great time recording a Brum Poets Radio Show last week with James Kearns and Tina Sederholm fronted by the lovely Willis the Poet AKA Rick Sanders. The show goes out on Sunday 24th June at 11:00am on Brum Radio. Here is a jolly picture of us. Tina's poems were very funny, relatable, clever and very quietly political. I really loved them. She's got something going on at the Edinburugh Festival - a one woman show kind of a thing. If you are going it's in a lunchtime slot somewhere - please go see it. I guarantee it'll be brilliant. I'm pretty sure I've heard James before... his delivery is really interesting and unique and I recognised it immediately. James' poems were dense and emotiona
