Michelle Diaz

Guest Poet: Michelle Diaz

Michelle Diaz has been writing since the late 90s. She has been published widely both online and in print in magazines such as Prole, Strix, Under the Radar, Amaryllis, Algebra of Owls and Domestic Cherry. Her debut pamphlet The Dancing Boy was published earlier this year by Against the Grain Poetry Press. She ran a poetry group in Glastonbury for 2 years and is part of Wells Fountain poets. Without poetry her soul would be very hungry.

Jonathan Edwards

Guest Poet: Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards's first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People's Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. He has read his poems on BBC radio and television, recorded them for the Poetry Archive, and led workshops in schools, universities and prisons. His second collection, Gen, was published by Seren in 2018. He lives in Crosskeys, South Wales, and works as a teacher.

29th August 2019, The Swan Hotel, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1LN

Heartfelt thanks to Jonathan Edwards and Michelle Diaz, our wonderful guest poets at Words & Ears in August. Michelle took us on a journey of birth, life, death and love with poems that nudge and renudge the surreal so that it wanders, blinking, through her gritty landscapes, where 'the sky was full of nouns' and 'All the cats buried in the garden / shake their bones.' Jonathan, meanwhile, introduced us to a new 'poem fetish' - a corner shop in love with its owner - and gave us glorious poetry etchings of a wide range of characters from lions (in the voice of John Lennon), to Kurt Cobain in TJ's, Newport ('People are brought into being by moments / like this'). Thanks also to our fabulous open mic-ers, Sue Boyle, Misha Carder, Richard Carder, Pey Oh, Stephen Payne, Ruth Sharman, Rosie Jackson, Tom Sastry, Heidi Beck, Ray Fussell, Peter O'Grady, Jinny Fisher, Rachael Clyne, B Anne Adriaens, Wayne Smith, Paul Brokensha, Anthony Barne, Martin Davis and Anne Gregson.