In-Person Workshop: Poetry and Happiness with Katrina Naomi

About this event

Join the Poetry Society and Katrina Naomi for a workshop on poetry and happiness. In this uplifting session, we’ll draw on a range of broadly positive poems. Katrina will guide you through free-writing exercises, which we’ll develop into poetry on the things we cherish. We’ll look at ways of turning difficulty around in our poems, to add surprise and fresh ideas within often complex emotions. Katrina will also offer tips on some of the practical sides of writing, how to look after ourselves as poets, how to deal with rejection (we all get rejected!), plus suggestions on how to keep our creativity flowing, even in the bad times. We’ll read, write and discuss. Bring a notebook and an open mind. Katrina Naomi’s fourth poetry collection, Battery Rocks, (Seren, 2024) won the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, the Holyer an Gof award for Poetry, and was recommended in The Guardian. Her previous collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and Saboteur Award, the latter jointly with Helen Mort. She is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize and has twice been highly commended in the Forward Prize. Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, The Verb, Open Country and Poetry Please, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation.