What’s on at Ware Poets?
Our monthly poetry evenings include a popular open-mic session as well as fabulous guest poets. Everyone is welcome to bring a poem for the open mic, but please read one poem only and avoid lengthy ones.
Mary Mulholland
Mary Mulholland is the author of the elimination game (Broken Sleep Books, 2025), What the sheep taught me (Live Canon, 2022) and two collaborations with Simon Maddrell and Vasiliki Albedo - All About Our Mothers and All About Our Fathers (Nine Pens, 2022, 2023). Her work has been widely published - 14 Magazine, Magma, Candlestick Press, and anthologised, such as in the Leeds University Virginia Woolf Anthology. She's also been placed and listed in many competitions, including Write Out Loud, Ware Poets, Kent & Sussex, the National, and the Bridport Prize. Mary Founded the poetry platform Red Door Poets and is a founder editor of The Alchemy Spoon.
Photo © Xavier Bonfill
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Jackson Phoenix Nash
Jackson Phoenix Nash (he/him) is a queer transgender poet and lecturer from Essex. His work explores life as a trans man, working class identity, mental health, and the body. His writing has been published in Magma, Propel, Under the Radar, Rattle, Channel, and many more. His poems have also been included in the anthologies Ware Poets Competition Anthology, eff-able, Transmasculine Poetics, and Propel Anthology: 2022 - 2024.
In 2025 he won third prize in the Magma poetry competition and was highly commended in the Ware Poets Competition. His poem ‘Call me Boy on Saturdays’ won the Rattle Ekphrastic Competition. Some People are Trains, Jackson’s debut pamphlet, was published by Little Betty in 2024. He was diagnosed in adulthood with ADHD and dyslexia, an experience which has been both challenging and liberating, and which continues to shape his creative process. He has a PhD in Gender Studies and teaches at the Open University.
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2026 prizegiving
Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2026: prize-giving celebration with Keith Jarrett
Everyone is welcome to this annual celebratory event. There will be readings of our competition's winning and commended poems, followed by a special reading from this year’s judge Keith Jarrett.
For more details about the 2026 Competition and Keith Jarrett see the competition page.
No open mic this month.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door.
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Free entry for competition prizewinners and commended poets.
Tashaney Hibbert-Jones, Ray Harper, Andrew Geary
Celebrating local poets
We’re delighted to be able to spend time with highly accomplished local poets Tashaney Hibbert-Jones, Ray Harper and Andrew Geary.
Tashaney Hibbert-Jones is a self proclaimed poet from North London, now based in Harlow, Essex. By day, she is your average Joe email marketer and by night, a spoken word artist who turns observation into confession. Drawing inspiration from the world around her, she steps outside herself to explore feelings, translating them into pieces that land as heartfelt, comedic, or quietly sensual. A versatile writer of both page and performance poetry, her work comes straight from the heart, confronting taboos, unsaid truths, and societal epidemics such as loneliness, relationship dynamics, and the unspoken desires we all carry.
Ray Harper,
an otherwise handyman,
fitted for the rigours of the prosaic life;
a kind of maker, builder, mender person,
retired now from remunerative tasks
but not from the uncertainties
as to what he has been or might become;
confesses
to the occasional lapse
wherein he may succumb
to some preternatural urge
and thus express himself
by poetry.
Words molest him,
talk wrong-foots him,
melodies obsess him.
Oh! And he dances.
He dances tango.
Only tango,
Argentine
Tango.
Andrew Geary… more information to follow.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door.
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Daljit Nagra
Daljit Nagra is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of Society of Authors, a PBS New Generation Poet, presenter of the weekly Poetry Extra on Radio 4 Extra,.
Daljit Nagra, MBE, has published four poetry collections, all with Faber & Faber, which have won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Book, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award, and been shortlisted for the Costa Prize and twice for the TS Eliot Prize. His latest collection indiom was a PBS Choice.
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Daljit Nagra's visit is part of a Ware Poets collaboration with Presdales and Chauncy Schools. We are very grateful for the support of Ware Town Council.
Clare Best
Clare Best has published a ground-breaking prose memoir The Missing List (Linen Press 2018) three full collections of poetry and various pamphlets and collaborative works. Her first full collection Excisions (Waterloo 2011) was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. The London Magazine said of her third collection Beyond the Gate (Worple Press 2023): ‘With this book Best reaches a level of poetic achievement that places her amongst the first rank of poets at work in the English language.’ She is currently writing in response to a family archive and working on several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists. New work has appeared recently in Finished Creatures, 14 Magazine, and Poetry Salzburg Review.
Clare is an Associate Lecturer with The Open University and a Tutor for The Arvon Foundation. In 2021, whilst holding a Fellowship at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, she wrote libretti for operas with composers Amy Crankshaw and Michael Bascom. She lives in East Suffolk, England.
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Karen Downs-Barton
Karen Downs-Barton is an award-winning Anglo-Romani poet based in Wiltshire. Her debut collection, Minx (Chatto and Windus / Penguin, 2025), a memoire in poetry, is shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Her pamphlet, Didicoy (Smith|Doorstop) won the 2022 International Poetry Book and Pamphlet competition was a 2023 Poetry Book Society recommendation. Karen has appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Verb, headlined Ledbury Festival, Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival, Deptford Literature Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival. Poetry from her PhD thesis exploring the development of identity through experimental and multilingual poetry won the Cosmo Davenport-Hines poetry competition. Karen has written for the i newspaper and her poetry has appeared in Ink, Sweat, and Tears; The North; Tears in the Fence, Rattle amongst others, is widely anthologised and has been translated into Spanish, Russian and Farsi.
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Leanne Ellul
Leanne Ellul is a poet, prose writer, and playwright whose work spans both adult and children’s literature. She was named Best Emerging Author at the 2016 Malta National Book Prize, and in the same year was listed in the Commonwealth Young Achievers Book. Her poetry collections include L-Inventarju tal-Kamra l-Kaħla (Merlin, 2020), Bjuda (Aġenzija Żgħażagħ, 2022), and Il-Manifest tas-Siġar (EDE Books, 2022). Her poems have been published in adda, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Columbia Journal, The Dallas Review, Voice & Verse, The Poetry Lighthouse, Tummy Ache, F Magazine, and Circumference, and have been translated into Arabic, English, German, Croatian, Frisian, Italian, Greek, and Slovenian. She is also the author of two award-winning young adult novels, Gramma (Merlin, 2015) and be;n il-kmiem (Merlin, 2025). Leanne lectures in Maltese language, literature, and creative writing, and is the Artistic Director of Inizjamed, a Malta-based literary NGO that organises the annual Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival.
Photo by Kenneth Scicluna.
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Gustav Parker Hibbett
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press, 2024), won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, among other honours. They were the 2025 Commissioned Writer for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and they have recently completed a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin.
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Tickets can be bought in advance or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.