Spoken Word Events over the Festival weekend …
- atkinsoncraig9
- Aug 25
- 4 min read
Friday 26th September
8:00pm Quillseekers. Diane Cockburn is headlining plus open mic. Venue to be confirmed.
Saturday 27th September at Allendale Library
10:00am Celia Carrington
10:30am Alex Reed
11:00am Ali Rowland
11:30am Tolu' A. Akinyemi
12:00noon Yaffle Press
12:30pm Alex Niven
1:00pm Degna Stone
2:00pm spoken word workshops
Diane Cockburn
Diane Cockburn is a surrealist Northern Irish poet whose poem Electric Mermaid was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Born in Magherafelt and raised in Belfast during the Troubles. Her work weaves myth, folklore, and dark humour to navigate unsettling realities.
Now based in Durham, she holds an MA in poetry from Northumbria University and is a member of the Vane Women writing collective. Her first pamphlet collection, Under Surveillance was published by Vane Women Press in 1999. Her second collection Electric Mermaid was published by Arrowhead Books in 2011. Her third collection Radiant Crow is due from Mudfog in October 2025. She is published in a range of magazines, anthologies, and online platforms, including The Forward Book of Poetry in 2012.
Celia Carrington
Celia lives on a hill farm amidst the fells and valleys of the North Pennines. She writes about relationships, the stunning landscape and the ordinary, which so often reveals itself to be extraordinary. She has been published in magazines and anthologies, including Broken Spine, Dawn Treader, Wee Sparrow press. Her first pamphlet “Ungrateful Heirs” was published in November 2024 by Yaffle press.
Alex Reed
“In this exhilarating poetic documentary, Alex Reed transports us to the ‘brightly hued reality’ of Butlin’s holiday camps with the All-Star Redcoats’ Show and the Lovely Legs competition. Dreaming Backward is a compelling social history of a pre-digital era. But it is also a musing on perceptions of time, how we choose to fill our leisure hours, and how that might be judged by others.”
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana
We are really excited that Alex will be performing at our Spoken Word event on the Saturday of our festival.
Alex’s poetry pamphlets A Career in Accompaniment and These Nights at Home illness highlight the issues surrounding care-giving and loss. His collection knots, tangles, fankles is a re-imagining of R.D. Laing & A. Esterson radical work on family life and ‘schizophrenia’. Most recently, Alex’s pamphlet Dreaming Backward looks at memory and nostalgia through stories about holiday camps.
Ali Rowland
Ali Rowland is a writer from Northumberland. She has been nominated for Best of the Net 2025, won the Hexham Poetry Competition in 2023, and has two published collections: Rooted (Maplestreet Press, 2024) and Dragged Up: A Northern Childhood (Sixty Odd Poets, 2024) You can follow her work at Musings of a Mad Woman on Substack.
Tolu’ A. Akinyemi
Tolu’ A. Akinyemi (also known as Tolutoludo & the Lion of Newcastle) is a multiple award-winning Nigerian British writer of twenty-three books in the genres of poetry, short stories, children’s literature, and essays.
In 2020, he won the Best Indie Book Award for his poetry collection, A Booktiful Love. His collection of short stories, Inferno of Silence, won the 2021 IRDA Discovery Award for short stories and Next Generation Indie Book Awards (2021) for Best Cover Design (Fiction).
A former headline act at Great Northern Slam, Crossing The Tyne Festival, Feltonbury Arts and Music Festival, The Havering Literary Festival. He was the guest poet at Havering Libraries Black History Month event in October 2021 and has previously headlined at Woolwich Centre Library National Poetry Day event in October 2018.
His works have been featured on BBC Sounds, Spark Sunderland, Lion and Lilac, and elsewhere. He is the founder of The Roaring Lion Newcastle, a UK-based book publisher, and sits on the board of many organisations.
Yaffle Press (Mark Connors and Gill Connors)
Mark Connors is a widely published poet from Leeds. His debut, Life is a Long Song was published by OWF Press in 2015. Nothing is Meant to be Broken was published by Stairwell Books in 2017. Optics was published by Yaffle Press in 2019. After was published by Yaffle Press in 2021. His novels, Stickleback (2016), and Tom Tit and the Maniacs (2018), were published by Armley Press. He is currently working on his third novel and a hybrid book of memoir, travel writing, short fiction and poetry. He is a managing editor and co-founder of Yaffle Press and Yaffle’s Nest.
Gill Connors is from North Yorkshire where she lives and works. Her pamphlet ‘Uninvited Guests’ was published by Indigo Dreams in 2017 and her two collections, ‘Tadaima’ and ‘A Small Goodbye at Dawn’ were published by Yaffle in 2019 and 2022. Gill is working on a third collection which will be the result of her PhD, on the subject of the links and parallels between sixteenth century and twenty-first century women. She is a managing editor of Yaffle and Yaffle's Nest
Mark and Gill will be reading from their debut joint collection ‘The Where we Were' out now through Yaffle Press.
Alex Niven
Alex Niven is the editor of Tribune magazine and the author of books including Folk Opposition,New Model Island, and The North Will Rise Again. He grew up in Fourstones in Northumberland and currently lives with his family in Newcastle.
Degna Stone
Originally from the Midlands, Degna Stone is a poet and poetry editor based in north east England. They are co-founder and former Managing Editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, a Contributing Editor at The Rialto and an associate artist with The Poetry Exchange. They are the current Project Manager for The Rebecca Swift Foundation.
They received a major Northern Writers Award for poetry in 2015, and their debut full-length poetry collection Proof of Life on Earth is published by Nine Arches Press.
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