Readings, talks and workshops 2025:
30 November 2025 6pm : Red Door Poets – Opening the door to alice hiller
I had the great honour of being invited by Tamsin Hopkins to be the featured Red Door Poet on Sunday 30 November. Over the course of an hour, I was in conversation with Tamsin about the creative process, and how art making and art-sharing can help us rebuild our lives and our selves in the aftermath of sustained trauma. I also read from bird of winter and shared new work. One of the things that remains strongly in my mind at the moment, as I work on a prose-ish memoir of my life from 0-18, is how vulnerable adolescents are in the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse, particularly if they remain in the orbit of their abuser. This was the case for me, and we looked at this relative to my own experiences, and poems that document this. The zoom recording accidentally pinned the audience view, so I am a tiny, talking postage stamp, but the screen-shared poems are full size, including the new work, and I hope they will speak to you, should you choose to check in here. Thank you as always for reading.
16 September 2025 7pm: Germinating poems of healing : Verve Poetry Online workshop
I’ve built this new workshop around the stages of the annual Osiris flood ceremonies, to create a process which supports us in seeding and nurturing works of creative regrowth beyond trauma. Following a carefully structured sequence of prompted exercises, involving poems, alongside the sacred objects used to celebrate these rituals in Ancient Egypt, we will explore grounding ourselves in the strength of our bodies, and the energies of the natural world, more safely to re-encounter times of danger and loss, and record our journeys beyond them towards healing and new life.
Readings and talks and workshops 2024:
17 September 2024 Verve Poetry online writing the felt self workshop
Following my colour workshop earlier this year with Verve Poetry I’ll be offering my ‘Writing the Felt Self’ workshop with them online on Tuesday 17 September. The link is here for anyone who is interested in finding out more. We will be working together to bring our sensory bodies, and our whole selves, into our creative practices to work more safely and joyfully into places where some of our deepest material waits for us to claim and call it into being.
17 July, 7.30 to 8.30 online I’ll be previewing a section of my new sequence of colour poems as the warm-up to Simon Maddrell’s free online launch of ‘a finger in derek jarman’s mouth’ Click this link to go to the event.
Hosted by Polari Press it’s a poetic tribute to Jarman’s inspiring legacy spun from the multi-coloured threads of his extraordinary life as a writer, artist, queer & AIDS activist, designer, filmmaker, and gardener.
I’ll be reading from new work in progress, ‘I am colour’ and chatting to Simon after his reading.
I was really excited to have been invited to appear at the Newcastle Poetry Festival in 2024. There’s a brilliant range of speakers and workshops. My dates are below, but I warmly advise you to check out the festival link, as events are both live and online, and I’m going to be attending as many as possible.
For anyone in the Newcastle area, I’ll be teaching an-in person workshop on Colour as portal and energy channel: working the rainbow to amplify your poems’ impact and reach on Friday 10 May, between 1-3pm. Click the title to book.
We’ll be exploring how colour can be channelled to intensify the emotional, political and philosophical resonances of your poems. Generative practical exercises will offer fresh ways into creating – including a colour-themed guided freewrite, and a three stage writing exercise drawing together memory and association with found materials to begin new and develop new work. I’ll be supplying visual prompts and art materials. Supporting this, we will also look at colour theory and consider how colour is used by poets including Elisabeth Bishop, Gail McConnell, Airea D. Matthews, Anthony Joseph, Paul Tran, Padraig Regan and Ella Frears.
I’ll also be reading live and online with my fellow Pavilion Poet Hannah Copely between 1.30 to 2.30 pm on Saturday 11 May as part of Pavilion Poetry’s 10th birthday celebration. Hannah has recently published her wonderful second collection, Lapwing, and I’ll be reading from bird of winter.
You can book live tickets here.
You can book online tickets here.
I was very excited to appear live and online at the Verve Poetry Festival in Birmingham this year with the incredible poets Nicole Sealey and Rebecca Goss. We headlined together on Saturday 24 February at the Patrick Studio in the Birmingham Hippodrome.
I taught workshops that go deep with using colour in your work, titled ‘Working the Rainbow’, and I’ll be offering the colour workshop again live in Newcastle.
2023
Wormholes at Ledbury Festival: A live in person workshop in making hand erasures 14-16 00 BST 1 July. In this joyous, reclamatory workshop we will be incorporating breath and short meditative practices to tune in to our unconscious and bodily selves and make hand erasures. These will create openings for stories that have not been able to find their ways into the world through more direct routes and help us speak those parts of ourselves which have been unspoken or held underground.
Tsaa with Roma : Writing the Felt Self Workshop 14 00 BST 22 June Online
Museum of Fine Arts, Split, Croatia, Friday 18 November, reading from bird of winter, live only.
Out-spoken Live Southbank 25 November 7.45 pm .
Forwards Prizes for Poetry 24 October 7pm book here for livestream at £7.50.
Forward Prizes book here for the in person ceremony at the Southbank at £15.00
Chener Books online Thursday 9 September at 7pm with Alice Miller and Sarah Westcott: For tickets please email: chenerbookshop@gmail.com
Poetry Book Society with Anthony Anaxagarou & Luke Kennard at 7pm 28 July Please click here to view the recording on YouTube.
Launch of bird of winter by alice hiller, Pavilion Poetry, 5 May 2021 here.
Reading with Julie Irigaray, Maia Elsner and Jennifer Lee Tsai to launch Julie’s debut with Nine Pens on 30 May 2021 here.
What We Read Now: Strength February 2021 with L. Kiew, Tolu Agebelusi and Serge Neptune
Two poems from the online launch of the Cambridge Literary Review here
‘Moon Poems from the Dark Side’: 7 pm The Harrison, 17/10/19. Bloomsbury Festival.
Launch of Dodo Provocateur by Anita Pati, The Poet, 24/9/19.
Behind the Mask Another Mask: Corrupted Poetry, October Gallery, 11/9/19 7.15 Details.
Poetry Society Poem-a-thon, 18/5/19, Poetry Cafe, 14.10 Details
Magma Launch: 2/4/19 Studio Voltaire, Clapham.
Poetry Festival Aldeburgh Queer Studio with Mary Jean Chan, Richard Scott, Caleb Parkin, Swithun Cooper and Danne Jobin and others at 17.30 on 3 November https://snapemaltings.co.uk/tickets/book/?eID=93002
Creative Futures Literary Awards
26 October 2018, Southbank Centre, 6.45 Book your Ticket
Stanza Bonanza : Poetry Cafe London, Betterton Street London.
23 August 2018 7 for 7.30 reading with my fellow Covent Garden Stanza poets.
Poetry Cafe, London :
7 October 2017 : Jerwood Arvon Mentees 2017-8
Hippocrates Awards :
The Poetry Foundation, Chicago : 11 May 2018-05-02
Jerwood Arvon Launch Midnight Listening :
Free Word Word Centre : 5 June 2018
‘Sculpture as Music’ :
Oxford Lieder Festival, Ashmolean Museum, 11.00 18 October 2018