Join Leeds Poetry Festival for these monthly wellbeing poetry group sessions where you can talk with fellow poets about how you're feeling while working on your latest poetic piece. The sessions will be group-focused, not run by any individual, but supervised by Poppy-Lee Jennings, our organiser.*
Join us at local libraries across Leeds for a fun weekly session of sharing stories and rhymes with time to play in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.
A great opportunity to meet with others and join the library as part of your visit.
Free event for under fives and their grown ups, just turn up.
Monday
10:30-11:30 - Dewsbury Road, Headingley, Pudsey, Whinmoor
13:30-14:30 - Central, Oakwood
This year’s festival is supported by Leeds 2023, the citywide celebration of culture which will interweave themes of untold stories, radical acts, playful adventures and future generations.
The Festival is very excited to be hosting poet, playwright, memoirist, performer and broadcaster Lemn Sissay OBE (above) as he brings his memoir My Name is Why to Carriageworks Theatre (Fri 3rd March). In it, Sissay reflects on his childhood, self-expression and Britishness, and in doing so explores the institutional care system, race, family and the meaning of home.
#23PRESS is a community publishing platform based in LS6, commissioned by LEEDS 2023 Year of Culture. We’re exploring how books get published, how audio work is created and how text-based artwork is exhibited.
Everywhere we go, people share their ideas for books we could publish. So, to capture this, we’re officially inviting people across our city-wide Leeds community to send us their ideas for books that could be published.
We want to collect all these ideas and put them into a book, an anthology of ideas!
So, tell us…
During the first Covid-19 Lockdown of 2020 Peter Spafford created 9 Song Portraits of older people in Leeds. Each Song Portrait was a picture of a person in words and music at a particular moment of their lives. Each song built up through a series of conversations over the phone, and in collaboration with the song’s ‘subject’ or ‘sitter’.
All the participants were referred by agencies who were important partners in the project - Headingley Methodist Elders, Neighbourhood Action New Farnley, Time to Shine & Fall Into Place Theatre.
What if you’re a visitor to the city? How do you find your way around? What if you have arrived here from a country far away, where the maps you are familiar with look very different to begin with? The maps available in the Tourist Office show the shopping centres, the waterfront, the Owl Trail, the Blue Plaques, the restaurants. What if you need to find somewhere to sleep that night – what sort of map is going to help you then?
In early October some of the team here at Slung Low spent a week at Holbeck’s Ingram Road Primary School reading our new children’s book ‘Emergency Story Penguin’ to the kids. At the end of the week we gave each one of them a copy.
That’s 340 kids.
Why did we do it? Because it came to our attention that some children in Holbeck who, when they start school, don’t own a book.
And here we are, trying to create the most exciting arts centre in the country and what matters that if there are kids in our community who don’t even own one book.