🗣️ 10 Books to Build Confident Poetry Voices 🗣️
My Poetry By Heart colleagues and I have co-written an article for the latest edition of Teach Reading & Writing all about getting younger pupils confidently performing poems.
Suitable for EYFS-KS2 pupils, you’ll learn all about our 10 favourite poetry and rhyming picture books plus lots of activities for lifting poems off the page!
Lovely to also see articles from Rebekah Simon-Caffyn, Jon Biddle & others in the latest edition.
Huge thanks to Andrea Reece, the Artichoke Media team and my lovely colleagues Suzannah V. Evans, Charlotte Bourne & Poetry By Heart Co-Director Julie Blake.
All my close reading sessions of 2026 for Literature Cambridge are now available to book via the Literature Cambridge website. If you see one you fancy, head here: https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/ and scroll down for the full list of courses arranged month by month. You’ll find all of the booking links and more information there.
Join me for our upcoming close reading sessions, all on Sundays, 2-4pm GMT via Zoom. This winter we will be repeating our sold-out Keats class, exploring some winter poems and getting to grips with Emily Dickinson’s dashes.
The most amazing review of my book Michael just came out in The Broken Spine.
It is so rare to have a full review devoted to a single book of poetry and I am so grateful to Alan for taking the time to so deeply understand my weird little collection.
You can, of course, buy Michael direct from Broken Sleep Books.
In 2017, a terrorist detonated a bomb in Manchester Arena at an Ariana Grande concert, killing 22 and injuring 1017 people. I was living in Manchester and wrote this poem a few years later about the experience of public mourning and memorial that happened in the aftermath as Mancunians came together in St Anne’s Square to remember the dead and injured, many of them young girls.
The poem is about the insufficiency of language to mark such a horror.
Heard this morning that my poem ‘New Years Eve, Kyoto, 2008’ was shortlisted for the Free Verse Prize 2025 – not bad considering they received 14,000 poems!
From next week I will be joining Poetry By Heart as their new Poetry and Digital Content Editor.
Poetry By Heart is England’s national poetry speaking competition, funded by the Department of Education. I’ve been working with PBH on-and-off since 2020 when I met Julie, one of the Co-Directors, while she was finishing up her DPhil at Homerton College where I was Poet-in-Residence.
I will be working on the timeline anthologies and overseeing a number of PBH publications – I can’t wait to get cracking!
I had an absolutely brilliant time on Monday 1st July 2024 working as part of the crew for this year’s Poetry by Heart Grand Finale.
Poetry by Heart is England’s national poetry recitation competition for young people. For the finale, 100 young finalists, aged from 7 to 18, traveled to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre from across the country to perform poems they chose to learn by heart and to compete for the title of Poetry By Heart National Champion.
I’d attended the finale in previous years as an audience member but this was my first time working as crew. My role was to prep performers, leading them through some warm up exercises and explaining what would happen on stage. Then, it was time to head upstairs to the ‘tiring house’ and then the backstage area where the young people waited their turn. I then got to go on stage and act as their prompter if needed.
It was an incredible thing to be onstage at the globe but what really blew me away was watching these young people, who were often very nervous in the lead-up, step onto the stage and shine.
There were so many supportive people around them: parents, teachers, friends etc., reassuring them and it was clear that so much time and effort had gone into getting them to the finale. But on stage, it was all on them. And every time it was like watching an airplane take off as they stepped forward and started to soar. Over and over again, these amazing young people began to fill this world-famous theatre with their voice and presence. It was completely remarkable to see and I was absolutely in tears by the time the winners were announced. I was so happy for everything these young people achieved.
