You’ll no doubt have seen Greg Freeman’s article on poetry promoters tentatively returning to in-person venues. These are springing up around the country at a delightful rate, with performers and audience members alike eager to return to beloved spaces. However, virtual events are still going strong, and are set to remain throughout summer.

 

The second of our Spoken Sessions will premiere on Thursday 10 June at 7pm UK time. Featuring live performances from Ella Frears and Sean Wai Keung, it’ll be available exclusively to patrons of our new Patreon channel.

We’ve launched three tiers on the Patreon channel:

1. £5 monthly– the standard subscription;
2. £7 monthly - solidarity subscription for those happy to add a donation;
3. A £3 subscription for any one of these:

• those unable to afford the £5 tier, or
• who donated to our fundraising campaign, or,
• are Kirklees residents.

Proof is not required.

We also have six open mic slots on a first come, first-served basis. To reserve a three-minute open mic slot, email matt@writeoutloud.net. We encourage applications from a diverse range of poets at all levels of their career.

If applying for the open mic, please note that we’ll be pre-recording this event over Zoom at 7pm on Monday 7 June – not to be confused with the broadcast date later that week! All you need to take part is a free Zoom account and a reliable internet connection.

 

As we continue to produce more content, we’ll introduce various levels of subscription on the Patreon channel. Greg Freeman reviewed the first batch of content on there, including the first Spoken Session with Kirsten Luckins and Will Harris, alongside our Caroline Bird masterclass and Saili Katebe workshop.

Your subscriptions will help us to generate a steady source of income. Write Out Loud as a core service will never disappear behind a paywall, but by charging for bonus content such as our Patreon channel, we’ll be able to grow and offer even more to the poetry eco-system.

 

Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her debut collection SHINE, DARLING (Offord Road Books, 2020) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward prize for best first collection, and the TS Eliot prize.

Ella has had work published in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Poetry London, Ambit and the Rialto among others and has been commended in the National Poetry Competition. She is a trustee and editor of Magma Poetry magazine and has been poet/artist in residence for the Tate Gallery, the National Trust, conservation organisation Back from the Brink and Royal Holloway University physics department where she was writing about the Cassini spacecraft. Her poems about the St Ives Modernists are currently on show at Tate St Ives.

 

Sean Wai Keung is a Glasgow-based poet and performer. His pamphlet ‘you are mistaken’ won the Rialto open pamphlet competition 2016 and he has also released ‘how to cook’ and ‘be happy’, both with Speculative Books. His first full collection sikfan glaschu was published by Verve Poetry Press in April this year. He has developed solo performances with the National Theatre of Scotland, where he was a Starter Artist in 2017, Anatomy Arts, Magnetic North and the Fringe of Colour, and is also a poetry editor at EX/POST magazine. He holds degrees from Roehampton University, London, and the University of East Anglia, Norwich and has been published in 404Ink, Blood Bath, datableedzine and The Suburban Review, amongst others.

 

The event will be hosted by Matt Abbott. Matt is a poet, educator, and activist from Wakefield. His debut one-man show Two Little Ducks earned 5* reviews at Edinburgh Fringe 2017 and on a UK theatre tour in 2018. The show’s poems were published as his debut collection by Verve Poetry Press in 2018. Matt was a patron for the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2020.