Details of our payment and cancellation policy can be found in our Terms & Conditions. Pay in full on registration, or select Klarna on checkout to pay in interest-free monthly instalments.

Academy Mini with Joelle Taylor & Malika Booker

Join the inimitable Joelle Taylor and Malika Booker on a four-week journey to deepen and energise your poetry practice.

The Academy Mini offers the opportunity to learn from tutors who are both experienced poet practitioners and teachers, and the time and structure to focus on your poetry in a supportive environment, comprising:

• two-hour tutor-led classes each week from 7–9pm UK on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and

• a scheduled half hour individual tutorial each week. 

The programme is designed around a weekly tutor rotation. You will receive two weeks of teaching and tutorials from each of our two fantastic tutors. 

Workshops and tutorials will be delivered via Zoom. You will have access to a dedicated classroom space on Padlet, where you will be able to access course materials and ask any questions, as well as a Padlet board where you can share poems, feedback and discussion with the other members of your cohort.

Workshops are recorded and the recordings will be made available to you, password-protected on our Vimeo, the day after each session. At the end of the course you will receive a handout collating the course materials, as well as links to the session recordings, to revisit in future.

Course delivery is wholly online. We welcome applications from students anywhere in the world, but applicants should note that all teaching is provided in evenings UK time.

Joelle Taylor

Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet was published by Riverrun in 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. Her most recent acting role was in Blue by Derek Jarman, which was directed by Neil Bartlett and featured Russell Tovey, Jay Bernard, and Travis Alabanza. Blue sold out its run across the UK and more dates are expected for the future.

Malika Booker

Malika Booker is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). The Anthology - Two Young, Two Black, Too Different, Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen was recently published to celebrate Malika Poetry Kitchen’s twenty-year anniversary. Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). Booker and Shara McCallum recently co-edited the issue of Stand Journal curating an anthology of poems by African American, Black British, & Caribbean Women & Identifying Writers. Booker currently hosts and curates Peepal Tree Press’s Literary podcast, New Caribbean Voices. A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). Her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75(autumn 2019) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2020). Her poem Libation, published in Poetry Review (winter 2022) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2023).