What’s on at Ware Poets?
Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2025 prize-giving
Everyone is welcome to this informal and celebratory event. There will be readings of our competition's winning and commended poems, followed by a special reading from this year’s judge Hannah Copley.
For more details about the 2025 Competition and Hannah Copley, see https://warepoets.org/competition-2025.
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.
Suzanne Pountney, Ashton Read & Thomas Anthony Ginn
Suzanne Pountney grew up in Chelmsford and now lives in Cheshunt. She has always loved creative writing, but didn’t start writing poetry until a few years ago. When not writing, she enjoys rowing on the river Lea.
Ashton Read is an aspiring young poet and watercolour artist who has been writing, reading, and expressing various forms of verse in the local community since the age of 15. Taking inspiration from the Romantic poets, with echoes of William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley in their work, Ashton has been placed in and won several local competitions, such as the 2024 "A New View" collection and the Mayor of Hertford's "Beautiful RIvers" writing competition (2025).
Thomas Anthony Ginn is a local writer and regular contributor to Ware Poets. His poetry captures the essence of everyday life, while documenting the fast paced changes of the world we live in. He does this with humour and beauty in a way that would please both poetry enthusiasts and normal people.
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 [link will be available soon] or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Patience Agbabi
We are delighted to welcome Patience Agbabi FRSL, a dynamic poet, novelist, workshop facilitator and Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. She has performed all over the world and taught Creative Writing for 30 years, from primary to PhD. Her poem ‘Eat Me’ is studied on the Edexcel A’ Level curriculum.
Patience Agbabi has created four poetry collections, including Telling Tales (Canongate, 2014), her retelling of The Canterbury Tales, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry plus Wales Book of the Year 2015. She has toured this work extensively at US universities including Harvard and Yale. Her middle-grade novel The Infinite (Canongate, 2020), launched The Leap Cycle, a time-travel adventure series. This was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and won Wales Book of the Year: Children & Young People category in 2021. The fourth and final book of the series, The Past Master, appeared in February 2024.
Photo (c) Lyndon Douglas
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 will be available on the door, but to avoid disappointment we recommend you buy yours in advance here [link coming soon]
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Patience Agbabi'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.
Troy Cabida
Troy Cabida is the author of Neon Manila (Nine Arches Press, 2025), Symmetric of Bone (fourteen poems, 2024) and War Dove (Bad Betty Press, 2020). His work has been published by Seaford Review, TLDTD Journal, and bath magg, anthologised in State of Play, Bi+ Lines, and 100 Queer Poems, commissioned by Tiffany & Co., The R.A.P. Party, and Small Green Shoots, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry 2024.
We’re delighted to welcome Troy and to celebrate his new collection Neon Manila, an exploration of the queer Filipino body in all of its skin and glitter. Looking at pop music, fashion, jewellery, dating mishaps, and everyday London life, the poems in this collection seek a better grasp of the relationships we build with ourselves, of the internal as constantly contoured by the external.
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 [link coming soon] or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.
Maggie Butt & Maggie Harris
The Two Maggies
One was born in Guyana, the other in London, but their different perspectives illuminate shared concerns and issues. Whether they are writing about the natural world, the climate crisis, war, the plight of refugees or the power of women, their poems get right to the heart of the matter. They will both have their 7th collections published early in 2025.
The two Maggies take the long view, from their own ancestors into an uncertain future. They are both grandmothers (one a great-grandmother) and have both been Royal Literary Fund Fellows, who share a deep love of language and playfulness with form.
Maggie Brookes-Butt’s New and Selected poems Wish includes poems from her six previous collections – about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love. They are gathered here alongside bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world.
Maggie Harris’s new collection I Sing with the Green Hearts is published by Seren in February. It is rebellious, open-hearted and world-inhabiting with a vibrant and rich verbal pallette which embraces a range of Englishes.
It sings for forests and nature and people, loud, clear and sweet. The greenheart of the collection’s title references Guyana’s hardwood tree, used throughout the world, whilst ‘green’ and ‘heart’ echo the importance of our ecology and our emotional response to how nature has been and is colonised by our needs.
There will be a reduced open mic slot this evening, but if you have a poem you’d like to read, do bring it and we will accommodate you if we can.
Tickets can be bought in advance [link coming soon] or on the door:
Entry prices: £5; £3 for students under 24; Free to ages 18 and under.