TAKE FIVE – Speakeasy Online Poetry Event
Part of TAKE FIVE – Weston Arts + Health Festival
Poet, editor, teacher and founder of the wonderful Poetry Pharmacy, Deb Alma joins the Arts & Health Festival with a reading and discussion at Weston’s latest Speakeasy Poetry Night (number 25!). While Deb spends much of her time organising events for other poets and promoting their books at the Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire and on the first floor of Lush Spa in Oxford Street, her acclaimed first collection, ‘Dirty Laundry’ from Nine Arches Press, is raucous, daring and honest, drawing contemporary women’s lives and those of our foremothers into the spotlight. In the words of Kim Moore, it is a collection of “poems that examine women’s lives in all their complexity, woven through with imagery that lingers in the mind and the heart long after you finish reading.”
Deb has worked using poetry with people with dementia, in hospice care, with vulnerable women’s groups, with children in schools, and has lectured at Worcester and Keele universities. As the Emergency Poet, she toured the country in her vintage ambulance, offering poetry on prescription to everyone who wanted it.
She is editor of “#Me Too – rallying against sexual harassment,’ ‘Emergency Poet,’ an anti-stress anthology, ‘The Everyday Poet’, ‘Ten Poems of Happiness’ and ‘The National Trust Book of Nature Poems’, while she co-edited the remarkable anthology, ‘These Are the Hands – Poems from the Heart of the NHS’ with Katie Amiel.
Some of the open mic slots for this special Festival edition of Speakeasy are dedicated to employees of UHBW NHS Foundation Trust, but if you would also like to participate please contact becky@superculture.org.uk for more information.
2024 is the fifth year for Weston Arts + Health Festival, a partnership between UHBW NHS Foundation Trust and Super Culture that shines a light on the creative provision that exists in Weston year-round to bring people together in positive, shared activity that can support both physical and mental health.
