PAST POETIC GUESTS

Robin Vaughan-Williams and Matt Black 19th May 2025

Olga Dermott-Bond & Roy Marshall, 7 Jul 2025,

Daniel Sluman, and Anna Saunders 8th September ‘25

Monday October 6th 7-9PM Poetry hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams,

Rency Jumaoas Raquid is a DPhil student/writer based in Oxford. His poems have been featured in the National Poetry Competition, Troubadour International and Winchester Poetry Prize. He has recently won the 2025 Ware Sonnet Prize. He volunteers at the Oxford Poetry Library.

& Tina Sederholm who is a poet who takes the written word and brings it alive on stage. Her poetry is funny, engaging and deceptively profound. She brings a light touch to awkward situations, and contends that no person or day is exempt from an interesting story. (@tinasederholm, www.tinasederholm.com).

Monday November 3rd, Poetry 7-9PM hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams

Zoe Brown (@zo.livia98 ) is a biologist and poet from The Bahamas, currently based in Oxford as she pursues her PhD. She writes poetry rooted in her personal experiences, exploring themes of identity, place, and the heart.

Vanessa Lampert (@vanessa_lampert_2018) is an Acupuncturist, editor and teacher. She is widely published, most recently in Poetry London and The Rialto. Poems from her collection Say it With Me (Seren) were selected for The Forward Prizes anthology 2024, The Telegraph poem of the week and The National Poetry Competition anthology 2020.

.Monday December 8th, Poetry 7-9PM

Tony Bicât & Frank McMahon

Tony Bicât is a filmmaker, lyricist and spoken word artist, winning awards in all these fields. He has written both scabrous agit prop poems (Political Filth) but also was highly commended in The Charm Poetry Competition last year for his poem The Grey Cat. He performs regularly at Catweazle and the Oxford Poetry Library and pre-lockdown was four times in the Oxford Finals of Hammer and Tongue voted by the audience and appeared at the National Finals at The Albert Hall 2019. He has lived near Chipping Norton for fifty years and has written two pantomimes for the Chipping Norton Theatre.

Frank McMahon. Career in Social Work,including Red Cross,ActionforChildren. Lives Cirencester; married, children, grandchildren. Published four volumes; poetry films shown at Wirral Poetry Festival; GWN prizewinner; read at Cheltenham Poetry Festivals; co-founder Writers in the Library; champions Poetry Together. "The Canticles of Spring,"

"The Light will Always Return".

Monday February 9th 2026 Poetry 7-9PM hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams,‍ ‍

Mat Riches and Lorna Burchell

Monday 9 February 2026, 7–9pm

Mat Riches & Lorna Burchell

Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence. Recent work has been in Wild Court, Bad Lillies, The New Statesman, and Finished Creatures. A pamphlet, Collecting the Data, is out via Red Squirrel Press. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings and blogs at Wear The Fox Hat. @matriches,@matriches.bsky.social, FB Mat Riches

Laura Theis's work appears in Poetry, Oxford Poetry, The Irish Times, etc. Accolades include the Caterpillar Prize, Alpine-Fellowship-Prize and the Arthur-Welton-Award from the Society of Authors for A Spotter's Guide To Invisible Things (Live Canon). Nominations include the Forward, Elgin and Best-of-the-Net. Her most recent books are Introduction To Cloud Care (Broken Sleep Books) and Poems from a Witch's Pocket (Emma Press). @wodehouse_and_i (Insta) Blu @lauratheis.bsky.social (Blue Sky)

Sunday 8 March 2026, 4-6pm Poetry Maria Whelan and Zoe Brooks, hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams,

Mariah Whelan is a British-Irish poet, teacher and interdisciplinary researcher. Her debut collection, a novel-in-sonnets called the love i do to you, was published in 2019. Poems from the novel were shortlisted for The Bridport Prize and the book has been shortlisted for The Poetry Book Awards, The Melita Hume Prize and won the AM Heath Prize. The collection was also selected as an Oxford Poetry Library ‘Book of the Month’.

Zoe Brooks is a poet who ives in Gloucestershire, England. Her long poem for voices Fool's Paradise won the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition award for best poetry ebook 2013. Her collection Owl Unbound was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in October 2020 and Fool’s Paradise was published as a print book by Black Eyes Publishing in 2022. Her third collection will be published in February 2026. 

Sun 12 April 2026, 4-6pm PoetryJane Lovell and David Clarke, hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams,

Jane Lovell is an award-winning poet whose work focuses on our relationship with the planet and its wildlife. She has been widely published in journals and anthologies in the UK and US.

Jane has won the Flambard Prize (2015), the Wigtown Poetry Prize (2018), the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize (2020) and the Ginkgo Prize (2020). She has been shortlisted for several other literary awards including the Basil Bunting Prize, the Robert Graves Prize and Periplum Book Award and has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

David Clarke was born in Lincolnshire and now lives in Gloucestershire. After giving up on writing for many years, He returned to poetry in 2009 and has since had poems published in a variety of magazines and on-line journals, including Iota, Anon, New Walk, Magma, Tears in the Fence, Poetry Salzburg Review and Bare Fiction.

His first full collection, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in September 2015.

Sunday May 3rd 6-8 pm Poetry with Martyn Crucefix and Rehema Njambi hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams,

Martyn Crucefix was born in 1956 in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. He has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published 5 collections of poetry, including Hurt, published by Enitharmon in 2010.

Rehema Njambi is a Kenyan-born, British-raised poet and writer whose work centres on womanhood, agency, faith and family. She has been a performance poet for over ten years and has performed broadly in the UK, Nairobi, and the US. In December 2020 she was longlisted for the Merky Books New Writers' Prize. She divides her time between Oxford and London.

Sunday June 7th 6-8 pm Poetry with Rachel Pantechnicon and Dr. Clare Mulley hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams,

Rachel Pantechnicon has read her poetry on Radio 1, Radio 3 and Radio 4, and is still waiting for Radio 2 to call. Rachel is many things: the author of the story-books about Cheesegrater Leg-Iron Lion; the winner of the Glastonbury Festival Slam 2004 (despite being the only person on site wearing court shoes); the most famous resident of Motspur Park since Jacko in 'Brush Strokes'. She is also the only poet ever to have been turned down by Burning Eye. "Technicolour suburban entertainment" - John Hegley "I was weeing myself" - Sue Perkins "I love Rachel Pantechnicon" - Josie Long ***** - Three Weeks magazine, Edinburgh Fringe

Dr. Clare Mulley is a published poet, story teller, Oxford University academic and former children's librarian, with several years of writing, publication and tuition experience, she is also interested in creative scholarship and translation, and the relationship between folklore, literary traditions, performance archaeology and memory studies. She is one of the committee running the Old Norse Poetry in Performance Conference (ONPIP), and is currently developing a creative translation, memory and performance project concerning the eddic poem Völuspá, which tells the story from Norse Mythology of the creation of the world, its coming end, and its subsequent rebirth.

Saturday July 4th 4 -4:20pm Michael Glover read from Vincent's Poets.

Vincent Van Gogh was an impassioned reader of poetry. What is more, he loved the exalted idea of poets. In 1888, less than two years before he took his own life, he entitled a new painting of Eugène Boch, a young Belgian painter, 'The Poet' because he wanted to define such a being visually.

The poet Michael Glover, in a suite of forty poems, not only writes about some of Van Gogh's greatest paintings, but also interrogates his turbulent nature as a man, revolutionary artist and lover of poetry.

Michael Glover is a Sheffield-born, Cambridge-educated, London-based poet, art critic, and poetry editor of The Tablet. He has written regularly for the Independent, the Financial Times, and the Economist, and was a London correspondent for ARTNews.

Sunday September 6th 6-8PM Poetry hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams, with Chloe Stopa-Huntand Dr Kate Noakes

Chloe Stopa-Hunt is a British poet and critic, currently living in the Cotswolds. Due to profound disability, she’s seldom able to attend public events, so we are very pleased that she will read. You can read some of her slightly older work online at the White Review, Poem, and Tender, and her most recent anthology publication appears in Ten Poets Get to the Bottom of Some Grisly Crimes (Sidekick, 2024).

At my body’s behest, I have become a poetica of atomisation, of dependency, of humiliation, of engirlment, of shaky rhapsody

Dr Kate Noakes writes poetry, short fiction, novels, and non-fiction. She is an elected member of the Welsh Academy of Letters and curator of poetry at Clifton Literature Festival.

In Sublime Lungs Kate Noakes turns her attention to the breath. For the first time, she explores her life-long asthma and tries to explain the impact of this chronic and disabling condition. The breath and breathing are also topics that cover a wide range of subjects,chronologies and geographies in this her ninth collection.

Thursday 17th September 2026 Giudecca Art Space, Venice (Palanca) Italy (part of “Venèzia, ła Chipping Norton del Vèneto”)

18:30 Philip Morre & Lorenzo Mullon

Philip Morre was born in London, but has spent most of his adult life in Italy, the last 20 years of which in Venice. For a decade, he sold – or failed to sell – old books in the Venetian Ghetto. Latterly he has translated for a living, there not being much of one to be had from poetry. Nevertheless, he has published two collections of poetry – The Sadness of Animals (San Marco Press, 2012) and Istantanea di ippopotamo con banane/ Snapshot of Hippo with Bananas (bilingual, Internopoesia, 2019) – and a number of pamphlets, most recently Treno a New York – and back (Sinopia, 2022) and Retorns (Rum Do Press, 2026).

Lorenzo Mullon was born in Trieste, where he studied piano at the Conservatoire. Before becoming a wandering poet, he turned his hand to a variety of callings. As well as writing poetry, he is a lover of painting. He has published Da una trincea di vento (Moretti & Vitali, 2018) and numerous pamphlet

Sunday October 4th 6-8PM Poetry hosted by Dr. Robin Vaughan-Williams, with George Roberts and Jane Griffiths

George Roberts has been performing poetry since 1980, has slammed with Hammer and Tongue, and had poems published in Fire, Magma, New Poetry from Oxford, The Nail and Catweazle.  He has performed in pubs, clubs, festivals, and open mics since 1980 in locations as far and wide as Oxford (where he lives), Birmingham, London, Ledbury, Philadelphia (where he was born), New York and Burlington. His book, When Life Looks Like Easy Street (2014), was published by Albion Beatnik.

Professor Jane Griffiths works primarily on English poetry and drama of the 15th and 16th centuries, with a particular interest in questions of voice, composition process, and literary authority. Her first book was John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (OUP, 2006); her second Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (OUP, 2015). With Adam Hanna of University College Cork, she co-edited Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), reflecting her interests in memory arts and representations of architectural space in literature.

She has had six collections of poetry published by Bloodaxe Books, most recently Little Silver (2022); Another Country (2008) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and Silent in Finisterre (2017) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In the five years between completing her BA and returning to Oxford for her DPhil, she trained and worked as a bookbinder, and she retains an interest in binding, material text, and artists’ books.