LITFEST21 - Friday, 30th April at 7.30pm: a poetry evening with Hastings Stanza, in association with Seahaven Poets

Join us for a special Zoom session featuring the work of five members of Hastings Poetry Stanza. The poets will be reading their own work and talking about the inspiration behind their poetry before opening the session to questions and comments.

 Access the Zoom link on Eventbrite

Entries are free. Any donations will go towards to the Crypt Gallery windows fund.

 The Poets

Brian Docherty was born in Glasgow, lived and wrote in north London for 40 years, where he was a member of Vertical Images and Word For Word Writers Group, and read at almost every London venue. He is now the Beach Bard of St. Leonards. He has published six collections, most recently Only in St. Leonards: A Year on the Marina, and Blue To The Edge.

Jill Fricker has had poems placed in a number of competitions including winning the Bare Hands International, 2nd place in the Four Counties Open Poetry and Rottingdean National Poets, and 3rd place in Sentinel Literary Quarterly and Writing The City. She has had poems published in anthologies, Poets Meet Politics, Shoreham Wordfest, Writing The City and Poems to Talk About, as well as the Morning Star.

Jackie Hutchinson was born in London, of Jamaican parentage. She has lived and worked in East Sussex since 2002, at a number of voluntary and public service organisations and departments including the NHS and the County Council. She has had poems published in Graffiti Magazine, and commended in the countywide East Sussex 'Feast of Words’ competition and the Brighton & Hove Arts Poetry Competition.

Antony Mair’s début collection, Bestiary, and Other Animals, was shortlisted for the 2017 Live Canon First Collection Prize, and published by Live Canon in June 2018.  His second collection, Let The Wounded Speak, was published by Oversteps Books in October 2018 and was longlisted for the Poetry Book Awards 2020. A third collection, A Suitcase Filled with Hope, is to be published by Live Canon in May.

Judith Shaw has lived in St Leonards on Sea since 2004 when she returned from Iceland, where she lived and worked for a year. She has had poems published in The Fib Review and Obsessed with Pipework, and was the Featured Poet in an edition of Orbis. She has been longlisted twice for Primers published by Nine Arches and for the Rialto Nature Prize. She is a printmaker and painter as well as practising as a psychotherapist and doing one-to-one study support with people with dyslexia and ADHD.