Words on Tap

Open Mic Event

Contact: m_stoppard@hotmail.com

A celebration of spoken word, featuring poetry from Becky Cherriman, John Hepworth and Michael Stewart, stories and songs from Mattthew Bellwood and novel extracts from Wes Brown. Plus limited open mic slots.

John Hepworth:

Thrice certified by the ILF, Leeds/Otley performance poet John Hepworth escaped poetry for decades, but it returned as stories, music reviews and songwriting before the poems set in. Whether tightly rhymed or rambling free he usually knows what will come out of his mouth, though never quite what will get into his head and turn into the compellingly-spoken poems that have brought pleasure and benign bewilderment to audiences at festivals, on radio, and at folk and poetry events across the county. He jealously guards his unpublished status and is the earthly manifestation of Zaardvaark The Wordsmiter.

Matthew Bellwood:

Matthew Bellwood is a writer and storyteller based in Leeds. Over the last few years, he has worked everywhere from the Canadian Fringe to the International Shakespeare Conference in New Zealand. Along the way, he has performed in schools, libraries, theatres and pop-up museums, at DIY rock gigs and, on one memorable occasion, to an audience of 1,200 girl-guides in a tent.

His stories range in style from traditional myths and folktales to interpretations of well-known literary classics. He also performs his own material - mainly stories about his life growing-up in Leeds.

As a writer, he is particularly interested in the beauty of the everyday, the futility of silence, the arrogance of the shy and the endless possibilities that life offers us to change ourselves, our lives and the lives of those around us.s a writer, he is particularly interested in the beauty of the everyday, the futility of silence, the arrogance of the shy and the endless possibilities that life offers us to change ourselves, our lives and the lives of those around us.

Michael Stewart:

Michael Stewart was born in Salford in 1971. His debut novel King Crow (Bluemoose, 2011) won The Guardian's 'Not the Booker' Prize, and was the only debut novel selected as a 'recommended read' for World Book Night 2012.

He was writer in residence at Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, from 2005-2008, and is now senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield. He is also editor of the celebrated series of Grist anthologies.

February 2013 sees the Valley Press publication of Couples, the first solo outing for Michael's poetry, which has previously featured in a range of magazines and anthologies. He lives with his partner and son in Bradford.

Wes Brown:

Wes Brown is a writer based in Leeds. He is the director of DEAD INK Publications, Co-ordinator at the National Association of Writers in Education and book critic at Politics on Toast. His debut novel, Shark, was re-published in 2012.

Becky Cherriman:

Becky is a Leeds-based writer, performer, single mum and creative writing facilitator who writes in a variety of forms. She works regularly for various organisations including Workers Educational Association and the West Yorkshire Playhouse, is one of the facilitators for the Ilkley Literature Festival Young Writers Group and takes private pupils. Becky has performed her work and traditional tales and ballads both solo and with other artists live on radio and at venues such as Seven Arts, Stage @ Leeds, Stockton Riverside Festival and Poems, Prose and Pints. She was shortlisted for the 2009 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Award and the 2009-10 Fish Short Story Prize, and in 2006, received a commission to write and perform an interactive children's story at The Rotunda Museum in Scarborough.

Becky is currently busy applying for funding for a one woman show 'Yolk', her first full length play, which she is hoping to tour next spring, seeking an agent for her first novel 'Yellow Brick Roads', and working hard on her second - when the cry of a new poem isn't demanding her attention! If contemporary poetry is your thing, have a look at the fabulous website Peony Moon. Two of Becky's poems 'Wolves' and 'My Paisley Quilt' are available there. Watch out for her poem 'The Girl You Took Home More Than Once', which is due to be published by Stairwell Books in an anthology on railways soon.

Entry: FREE

Time: 7.30pm (doors)