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Out-Spoken Academy with Caroline Bird, Anthony Anaxagorou & Jack Underwood

Each week will comprise:

• two two-hour tutor-led workshops (7–9pm UK, Monday & Friday);

• one-hour weekly peer feedback session (7.30–8.30pm UK, Wednesday); and

• a scheduled half hour individual tutorial on a Tuesday or Thursday, where you can discuss your work one-on-one with that week’s tutor. The programme is designed around a weekly tutor rotation. You will receive two weeks of teaching and tutorials from each tutor. 

You’ll focus on craft discussion, close-reading and generative excercises, as well as receiving developmental advice and support. Workshops and tutorials will be delivered via Zoom and you will have access to a dedicated classroom space on Padlet, where you will be able to access course materials and ask any questions.

We believe in the importance of peer community and feedback. You will have access to a Padlet board where you can share poems, feedback and discussion with the other members of your cohort, and will have the opportunity to join a WhatsApp group of students.

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 all the course materials, as well as links to the session recordings, to revisit in future.

Course delivery is wholly online. We welcome participants from anywhere in the world, but please note that all teaching is provided in evenings UK time.

Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics. As a playwright, Bird has been shortlisted for the George Devine Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her Selected Poems, Rookie, was published in May 2022. Her latest collection, Ambush at Still Lake, was published by Carcanet in 2024.

Anthony Anaxagorou

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. His second collection, After the Formalities, was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry.

Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, publisher of Out-Spoken Press, and editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Jack Underwood

Jack Underwood is a poet, writer and critic. He is author of Happiness (Faber 2015), Solo for Mascha Voice (Test Centre, 2018) and A Year in the New Life (Faber 2021). His debut work of non-fiction, NOT EVEN THIS, was published by Corsair in 2021, exploring parallels between quantum physics, black hole science, cyborgism, and the philosophies of language and knowledge and poetics, all through the lens of new parenthood. He has collaborated widely with composers and artists, and his work has been published internationally and in translation. He is co-presenter and curator of the Faber Poetry Podcast and is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, and is currently working on a collection of short fiction.