A pay as you feel evening of live poetry and music performance with award-winning guests Rachel Bower and Matt Hooper.
Rachel Bower is the Shipley-born author of two poetry collections and an academic book on literary letters. Her debut novel, It Comes from the River, will be published by Bloomsbury in January 2025. She is currently working on a poetry collection about endangered insects.
Rachel’s poems and stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including The White Review, Magma, The Rialto and Stand. She recently had a poem Highly Commended in the Ginkgo Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Best Poem of UK Landscape 2023. Rachel won The London Magazine Short Story Prize and the W&A Short Story Competition in 2020. Her work is represented by Cathryn Summerhayes at Curtis Brown.
Matt Hooper is a multi award winning singer-songwriter based in Yorkshire.
A stint in Nashville landed him a Billboard no.1 & he brings some music city inspiration to his new material mixing classic U.S heartland (Springsteen, War On Drugs) with indie northern UK vibes (Elbow, I am Kloot, Stephen Fretwell).
'Hands & Knees' streams here
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The evening also features the opportunity to hand-print some lines of poetry and some lyrics on the People Powered Press's little sister, the Mini People Powered Press – exclusive A3 letterpress prints to take away and keep, signed by you and the artists.
And the bar will be open...
with support from members of the Poetry School in Saltaire group.
Kristina Diprose co-runs the Rhubarb at the Triangle open mic in Shipley, and co-edited its anthologies Un/Forced and Seconds. She won the inaugural Oxford Canal Festival poetry competition in 2024, has been shortlisted in the Ginkgo Prize and Leeds Poetry Festival competitions, and was an Ilkley Literature Festival 2023 New Northern Poet. Thin Spells, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is forthcoming in 2025 from The Black Cat Poetry Press.
Instagram: @kristinadiprose
Adrian Salmon lives in Bingley, West Yorkshire. Birmingham born, he was brought up in and around the Black Country and Worcestershire. His poems have appeared in Algebra of Owls; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Prole; Strix; and WRITE where we are NOW. In 2021 he was commissioned by the Edvard Grieg Kor in Bergen, Norway, to write four poems to be set to music by their associated composers. Adrian’s pamphlet, Moonlight through the Velux window, was published in June 2019 by Yaffle Press.
Laura Strickland is a carer and MA student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include The North, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dreamcatcher, Northern Gravy, Strix, The Frogmore Papers and Butcher’s Dog. She is one of 20 poets included in Poetry Archive's Worldview 2023; highly commended in Nine Arches Primers and was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2023.
