Unknown is a collection of twenty-seven poems by Anna Rose James and Elizabeth Cadwick Pywell. Over the past decade there has been a real movement towards centring women’s voices in poems and prose. Unknown belongs to this movement as it is inspired by women from myth and history who have been forgotten and neglected. Continue reading
What better time than Autumn to observe nature’s transient gifts and cosy up with a book? This November sees the launch of brand new Staffordshire-based poetry publisher Fawn Press, and their inaugural anthology, Elements: Natural & The Supernatural. Founded and edited by established local poet Scarlett Ward-Bennett (Ache, Verve Poetry Press), Fawn Press “aims to publish beautiful books of exceptional poetry, as we believe that poetry has the power to change lives through that transcendental connection between writer and reader.” Continue reading
As the theatre door opens the group are testing their instruments, bantering like close friends. The audience is greeted warmly as they enter, creating the atmosphere of going to see a friend play at an open mic night. Continue reading
“I’ve got two dads. One’s black, so that makes me black, so I’m told.” It is with these words that David Judge begins SparkPlug, his semi-autobiographical account of growing up as a mixed-race child in the eighties and nineties. For the most part, he plays his father (also called Dave), examining his own childhood through the eyes of a white man, married to a white woman, who is giving birth to a child fathered by a black man. Continue reading
It seems like a strange concept – competitive poetry. But as Say Owt demonstrate, with a capacity audience for their twenty-first, coming-of-age, Slam – it is a hugely popular one. The company comprises Henry Raby and Stu Freestone, who have burgeoned from humble beginnings into York’s prominent purveyors and promoters of performance poetry and Spoken Word. Not that they don’t still flaunt that humble start; their signature backdrop, a banner home-made from an old single bed sheet, proudly holds the signatures of all the poets that have performed in its shadow. Continue reading
Portraiture is a poetry collection by York-based writer James Parker, containing verse which captures glimpses of Parker’s close friends and loved ones in intimate one-page poems. Continue reading
American rappers and award-winning poets, Sage Francis and B. Dolan, are taking their Epic Beard Men tour to York. Continue reading