• Zaffar Kunial & Antony Dunn, Sun 5 Dec 2021
  • Clare Shaw & Antony Dunn, Sat 8 Jan 2022
  • Malika Booker & Antony Dunn, Sat 2 Apr 2022
  • Two contrasting and complementary workshops – with Antony in the morning and his guest poet in the afternoon – will equip you with a range of new skills and ideas to refresh your poetic practice.

    In a range of reading, writing and conversational games, you’ll explore some unusual sources of inspiration and some new techniques. Take home a small collection of new poems – finished or drafted – which might just take you by surprise…

    The day ends with a short reading by both poets from their own poems.

    “Antony is an excellent facilitator and ensures everyone feels their input is valued and heard.”
 – Emma, workshop participant, 2021

    You'll also have the chance to contribute your words to a giant mural by the People Powered Press.

    Price includes lunch.

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    Your tutor

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    Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. His first book – Us – was published by Faber & Faber in 2018 and was shortlisted for a number of awards including the Costa Poetry Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Sinead Morrissey says: ‘his is a wondrous poetic of loopholes, portals and translations, and of the magic in-between’. A pamphlet, Six, was out from Faber in 2019.

    Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Her first two collections with Bloodaxe were Straight Ahead (2006), which was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for Poetry and attracted a Forward Prize Highly Commended for Best Single Poem, and Head On (2012), which according to the Times Literary Supplement is 'fierce, memorable and visceral'. Her later collections are Flood (2018), a New Writing North Read Regional title in 2019, and Towards a General Theory of Love (2022), written after winning a Northern Writers' Award. She is co-director of Kendal Poetry Festival, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and a regular tutor for the Writing Project, the Poetry School, Wordsworth Grasmere and Arvon.She also works as a mental health trainer and consultant and has taught and published widely in the field, including Our Encounters with Self-Injury (eds. Baker, Biley and Shaw, PCCS 2013) and Otis Doesn't Scratch (PCCS 2015), a unique storybook resource for children who live with self-injury. Along with the novelist Winnie M Li, Clare was the recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters award in 2019, creating workshops and an online resource for survivors of trauma. In 2021, she co-wrote and presented Four Ways to Weather the Storm for BBC Radio Four, examining the relationship between creativity, landscape and resilience. Clare lives above Hebden Bridge with her daughter and their two pet rats.

    Malika Booker is a poetry lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage and the founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen.Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3:Your Family: Your Body (2017) and her poem Nine Nights, first published in The Poetry Review in autumn 2016, was shortlisted for Best Single Poem in the 2017 Forward Prize. Malika currently hosts and curates Peepal Tree Press’s Literary podcast. A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry, and her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75(autumn 2019) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2020). Malika received her MA from Goldsmiths University and has recently begun a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle.

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    All proceeds from this workshop will be used to support the People Powered Press' work with community groups around the Bradford district, amplifying local voices and spreading words worth spreading.

    Making the People Powered Press' workshop Covid-safe

    Although we’re launching this season of workshops at a time of uncertainty about future Covid-19 restrictions, we’re making sure that the workshop is designed and equipped to keep you safe and comfortable now, and in the event of any future developments.

    So here’s what's being to make the People Powered Press a safe, creative place.

    • Staff will be tested for Covid on the morning of the day on which any workshop will take place.
    • All participants will be asked to take a Covid test before travelling to the workshop.
    • The space will be well ventilated, using our in-built extraction system and an air purifier.
    • We have sanitiser stations around the space and there are wipes for cleaning surfaces and shared equipment.
    • Masks will be worn inside the building if and when official guidance indicates that they should.
    • We will provide workspace dividers if and when official guidance indicates that we should.
    • BOOK WITH CONFIDENCE: if your workshop has to be postponed, your ticket will still be valid for the rescheduled event. If you're not able to get to it, we will offer you a full refund.

    We’ll regularly review all these measures against the latest government guidance, and we hope that this will reassure you that you’re in a comfortable, safe environment, and that we’re taking your safety very seriously indeed.