Happy Monday!
We’re having a little bit of a different meeting format for this month: it will not be in-person. Our next monthly meeting will be taking place on Zoom to accommodate our upcoming guest poet: Tom Bailey.
As usual, we’ll be starting at 8pm on the 21st of July. We’ll have an open mic on Zoom before we receive a lovely reading from Tom, so be sure to let us know if you’re interested in bringing a poem to the virtual stage.
Because this meeting will be exclusive to Zoom, unfortunately this means it will be a members-only meeting. To get access to the Zoom call, you will receive details in our upcoming email, which you should receive if you’re a part of our mailing list as a member.
If you’re not yet a member and you’re interested in joining, please send us an email at kentandsussexpoetry@gmail.com! Membership only costs £20 a year, and £15 for students, retired and other unwaged individuals.
We look forward to seeing you all there!
Tom Bailey is a widely-published poet and editor based in Edinburgh. He is a teacher of English and Creative Writing and edits the online magazine And Other Poems. His debut pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, won the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize 2024 and an Eric Gregory Award. He has also recently won the SoA’s Somerset Maugham Award 2026.
In 2023, he won the Hamish Canham Prize for his poem, The dead twin and I are housemates now’ and has been nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He was a member of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective 2022-23.
Celia Knapp says of Tom Bailey’s work, ‘he makes the ordinary spectacular … tilts the world to allow us to see it differently and evokes the baffling, beautiful experience of living, grieving, loving, existing.’
He is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Royal Holloway.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 