Sharpen your skills and develop your practice with some of poetry's leading lights.

Bad Betty masterclasses take place in the afternoon prior to each Bad Betty Live show, and offer a chance to work closely with one of the featured acts.

What happens when we treat vulnerability not simply as something a poem describes, but as something it actively performs? Drawing on poets including Sharon Olds, Ocean Vuong, CAConrad, and Bhanu Kapil, this workshop explores confession, intimacy, embodiment, shame, and the construction of the self on the page. We’ll think about what it means to perform a version of ourselves through poetry - and about the complicated ethics of making ourselves, and others, visible. When can disclosure become an act of agency? What can be revealed, transformed, or withheld?

Through close reading and generative exercises, we’ll explore vulnerability not simply as a subject, but as a formal, ethical, and relational choice. We’ll experiment with the self as material: performed, distorted, withheld, fractured, exaggerated, and reinvented. What if exposure is not an arrival at truth, but a way of opening the poem into stranger, riskier, more unexpected forms of possibility?

About the facilitator:

Rachel Long’s debut collection,My Darling from the Lions(2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The Costa Book Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, The Rathbones Folio Prize, and the Jhalak Prize Book of the Year by a Writer of Colour. Long is a guest lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London. She was born in London, and now lives in Margate.

Venue & Access:

This workshop takes place in the Learning Room at New Art Exchange (NAE). There is a lift and accessible toilets. The building is fitted with induction loops for enhanced sound. Disabled parking is available on request.Full accessibility info here. (https://www.nae.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/May-2023-Access-Statement-large-print.pdf)

New Art Exchange (NAE) is the UK’s largest gallery dedicated to contemporary visual arts from the Global Ethnic Majority. Based in Hyson Green, Nottingham, NAE champions inclusivity and equity in the creative industries, nurturing and celebrating talent from diverse backgroundsAbout Us page on our website (http://www.nae.org.uk/page/who-are-we/3).

About Bad Betty:

Bad Betty Press is an award-winning independent poetry publisher, and curator of live literature events taking place across the UK. London-born, Nottingham-based, Bad Betty was set up in 2017 with the aim of showcasing risk-taking poetry, supporting poets’ artistic development and celebrating stories less often told.

Bad Betty is a British Book Awards Small Press of the Year Finalist (2024, 2023), a Michael Marks Publishers' Award winner (2022), and the parent of pamphlet imprint, Little Betty.

Description supplied by the event organiser.