Category: By our members
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Memory-gathering by Emily Downes
New recruit and Spoken Word Boot Camp graduate Emily Downes reflects on creating pop-up poetry with the TWP team at two special events this year… In summer 2025, Hartlepool Borough Council offered Tees Women Poets the use of the beach huts in Seaton Carew for creative activities, and I was lucky enough to be involved.…
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Why so many witches?
Wordy witches is a theme we come back to often, in a light-hearted way. Is it because as poets we can’t resist the alliteration? Maybe our feminist souls are drawn to the power of crones and the history of women’s oppression? Or perhaps as performers we’ve never quite grown out of dressing up? Whatever it…
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Messages from a Bottle
Poets Eithne Longstaff and Ann Cuthbert have collaborated on a renga, a call-and-response form that engages two or more poets in a collaborative journey of imagery and associations threaded together in couplets and haiku. ‘Messages’ was made over a number of weeks, by email, to reflect the Bottle of Notes associations of messages sent and…
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Spoken Word Boot Camp 2025
Applications are now open for our third (and last?) Spoken Word Boot Camp at Middlesbrough Town Hall this summer. This intensive 6-Saturday course is open to women and gender non-conforming poets who live, work, or study in Teesside. Led by experienced TWP sisters, each session teaches essential skills for performing your words with confidence. Participants…
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From Teesside to Geneva
A special guest testimonial from Julie Easley Who would have thought when I joined Tees Women Poets that I would end up at the United Nations, for the CESCR (Committee for the Economic, Social & Cultural Rights) 7th Review of the United Kingdom in Geneva, Switzerland? It all started when Tees Women Poets partnered up…
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Formal introductions
What makes a poem a poem? Is it about knowing when to rhyme, and how many feet to a line, and recognising a sonnet when it slaps you in the face? Last week a bunch of us had some fun with the oddest, made-up poetry forms we could find – and then we made up…
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AI Call to Action: Empowering Creatives to Tackle Algorithmic Bias and Shape a Sustainable Future
As creatives, writers and visionaries, we hold a unique power to shape the future of technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers new creative tools, but it also presents profound challenges – particularly with algorithmic bias, where AI systems reflect and amplify biases already present in society and within ourselves.
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A poetic job application
This autumn, our poet-in-residence at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art is Sarah Crutwell. This is our fourth residency at MIMA, and it was the hardest yet to between talented and passionate applicants. With a brief to respond to the Towards New Worlds exhibition of art by disabled and neurodiverse visual artists, it was clear that…
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Digital Eves
We’re a bit worried about AI. We’re a bit excited by AI. We’re a bit intrigued by AI. We’re a bit addicted to AI?
Tees Women Poets 