See if you can keep up with our speakers as they take you for a 10-minute spin into their lightning talk topics!

Join us for an afternoon of quickfire talks on a whole host of poetry-related topics!

The event will consist of a series of 10 minute presentations, followed by questions and discussion.

Speakers

Prolific but Unpublished by Hannah Chapman

Hannah Chapman is a writer specialising in graphic narratives and critical biography. Her most recent essay “Casting Mr Collins: Or How a Zombie Film Returned Us to the Novel,” co-authored with Lauren Burke, appeared in Austen after 200: New Reading Spaces (Palgrave, 2022).

Also with Lauren Burke, she is the co-author of the award-winning Why She Wrote: A Graphic History of the Lives, Inspiration, and Influence behind the Pens of Classic Women Writers (Chronicle, 2021) and host of the podcast Bonnets at Dawn. Other projects include creating and editing the award-nominated anthology series Comic Book Slumber Party and co-organising Bristol Comic and Zine Fair (2013-2018).

Hannah is a Lecturer in Professional Practice in the Humanities, module leader for Writing Graphic Novels and Comics in the Creative Writing programme and supervises student-led projects in graphic narratives. Prior to teaching, Hannah worked for IOP Publishing.

Even God Gets Distracted Sometimes by Luigi Coppola

Luigi Coppola is a poet, performer, teacher and multimedia artist. A Poetry Archive Worldview winner, Bridport Prize shortlisted writer, Ledbury and National Poetry Competition longlisted poet, and Lost Souls and Farrago Slam Champion, he has performed at Glastonbury Festival, Southbank Centre, Tate Modern and Bloomsbury Festival. His debut collection, Even God Gets Distracted Sometimes (Broken Sleep Books), combines poetry, visual art, music and performance.

Why ain’t poetry dead yet? by Dan Leighton

By all rights, poetry should have disappeared. We barely teach it in schools. It is seen as hard, and difficult, and inaccessible. Sales are, essentially, non-existent. And yet, it is having a new-form revival on social media platforms.

In this interactive lightning talk, Cambridge Poet and Musician, Dan Leighton, will dig into why we still keep doing poetry - despite everything! He will try to help us reveal our own reasons and motivations for continually coming back to this ancient art form. Poetry ain’t dead yet!

Dan Leighton is a writer, musician, technologist educator and founder of Cambridge Poetry Magazine (https://www.cambridgepoetry.com/). He claims to write poetry as the only form short and intense enough to be suitable for someone with ADHD. He writes regularly on themes of redemption, loss, longing and incompleteness. He loves puzzles and firmly believes that the meaning of a poem belongs to the reader. While outwardly deceptively simple, therefore, his poetry is often packed with multiple conflicting meanings and contradictory layers for the reader to choose their own path of discovery. As a musician, he loves intense rhythmic patterns and these can often be found in his work honed close to the intent of the poem. He also makes cheese. And custom builds harmonicas. And sews clothes.

What does good poetry criticism look like? by Jon Stone

Jon Stone is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University and an editor at Sidekick Books. His poetry has previously won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award, the Poetry London Prize (twice) and the Sarabande International Chapbook Prize. His latest book is Instar Hotel (Sarabande, 2026). He has also published a monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games (DeGruyter, 2022).

Francisco Javier Guerrero Cano and the Poetry of Sickness by James Womack

James Womack is a Cambridge-based writer, translator and educator. His poetry collections are Misprint (2012), On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017), Homunculus (2020) and Why Are You Shouting? (2024).

Description supplied by the event organiser.