It gives us great pleasure to welcome John Foggin as a regular guest blogger to Write Out Loud. John’s weekly poetry blog, The Great Fogginzo’s Cobweb, is ardently followed by many poets. We’re hoping that this platform on Write Out Loud will enable John to reach out to even more.  

John has been a teacher, lecturer and LEA English/drama adviser. He lives in West Yorkshire where he jointly organises Puzzle Poets Live in Calderdale. His work has appeared in poetry magazines such as The North, Prole, and The Interpreters House, and his poems ‘Camera Obscura’ and ‘A weak force’ were highly commended in the Forward prize in 2014 and 2017.

He is also a serial poetry competition winner, which we have reported on in the past. His poems have won first prizes in competitions including The Plough (2013, 2014), Camden Lumen (2013), Ilkley (2015), The McLellan (2015) , The Poetry Business international pamphlet competition (2016), The Sentinel (2016) and Indigo Dreams pamphlet competition (2017). The judges have included Andrew Motion, Liz Lochhead, Billy Collins, Blake Morrison and Simon Armitage.

He is author of five pamphlets: Running out of space, Backtracks, Larach (Ward Wood Publishing 2014), Outlaws and fallen Angels (Calder Valley Poetry 2016), and Advice to a traveller (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2018).  He has had two published collections: Much Possessed (mith|doorstop 2016) and Gap Year (co-authored with Andy Blackford, SPM Publications 2017).

You can read John’s second blog for Write Out Loud here