Vida Adamczewski s a writer from Peckham (London, UK). At Oxford, she read Politics, Philosophy and Economics with a focus on disability justice. Vida did much of her studying from bed, and this horizontal perspective permeates her writing. Her writing appears in The London Magazine, Sick Magazine, Field, Mslexia, Ambit, Document Journal, The Mays Anthology, Byline Times, Vittles and in Ache Magazine’s new anthology, Fit Notes. She has performed at the Playmill New Writers Festival, Byline Festival, and the Ledbury Poetry Festival. In 2023 Vida launched Yer Bard, a monthly poetry event in South East London. Vida received the UEA New Forms Award 2022 for her lyric play AMPHIBIAN, which appears in her first collection of stories, Amphibian and Other Bodies (Toothgrinder Press 2023). Join Vida for Imagining a Poetic Pain Scale (26 March).

Khushi Bajaj (she/her) is a multilingual artist and writer from Lucknow, India who currently lives and creates in London. Her work has been published in two anthologies by Penguin Random House, in the Gay Times, Gaysi Family, Diva, Feminism in India, Metro UK, and in various journals. She has experience conducting artistic workshops for all age groups and focuses on making her material accessible and dynamic. Her work deals with decolonisation, identity, social justice, and occupying space for marginalised perspectives. She is passionate about intersectional feminist politics, supporting local communities, and radical kindness. Join Khushi for Bloody Bodies: A Collage-Poetry Workshop focused on Menstrual Disorders (6 December).

Mymona Bibi is a Bengali-British writer, facilitator and teacher based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her writing has been featured in the Ilkley Literature Festival, Magma Poetry, Butcher's Dog, Ey Up, Corridor 8 and Lumpen Press. She has produced and performed at events such as the Newcastle Fringe Festival (2023), NOVUM (2023 and 2024), Skin Deep and Poetry Translation Centre’s Polylingual Poetry Night. She is also an emerging creative associate of New Writing North exploring multilingual creativity and displacement. She created and now facilitates the World Writes multilingual writing group. You can find her on Instagram @wordsbymymona. Join Mymona for Multilingual Imaginaries (3 November).

Ria Cordeiro is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and holistic therapist with a deep-rooted passion for creative expression. With a background in dance and choreography, Ria has long used writing as a bridge between conceptual themes and the surreal, abstract qualities of movement. Over the years, their practice has expanded to include plastic arts and holistic therapies, where somatic and artistic practices play a vital role in facilitating self-connection, grounding, and healing. Ria’s approach is inspired by Pina Bausch, whose creative processes highlighted the transformative power of text and storytelling, and how writing can ground and deepen artistic and therapeutic practices, through explorations of the self and the world. Through workshops and creative projects, Ria celebrates the intersection of writing, movement, and holistic healing, offering a dynamic space for people to explore their emotions and inner landscapes. Join Ria for Unlocking Your Creativity: A Journey through Writing & the Subconscious (3 March).

Alice Eaves is a writer & creative facilitator from Blackpool, England. She is editor of the translated poetry collection Tiny Flames: Voices from Ukraine, featured on BBC Scotland, and winner of the 2024 Solstice Nature Writing Prize. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh and Head Poetry Editor at Forest Publications. Join Alice for Writing Our Roots (9 December).

Emily Fitzell is an artist & researcher based in Kerry, Ireland. Their work, often collaborative, moves between text, sculpture, performance & translation. Over the past few years, they’ve been slowly growing projects that centre acts of gathering through the shaping of ‘worksites' - places where stories, experiences & knowledges can be shared: from *ambulithics* (a sculptural template combining local materials & forms of ritual) to *the mantle* (a community arts project that weaves together coastal mythologies & ecologies). Having studied & taught through the Modern Languages Faculty at the University of Cambridge, most of their current work takes place online or outdoors on the Iveragh Peninsula. Earlier this year, they undertook a research residency looking at the intersections of the housing & climate crises in South Kerry. Some of their recent projects have been supported by Creative Ireland, Kerry County Council, Cumas Ceantar Uíbh Ráthach, Rua Red Arts Centre & IMMA’s Earth Rising Festival. Join Emily for Writing as an Ecotone (12 April).

Lily M. Frenette comes from Minnesota, US, and was raised by the woods and waters. She writes at the intersection of nature, magic, art, and community. They enjoy working in multiple mediums, including: photography, painting, audio, printmaking, participatory experiences, and crafting. She is open for representation. Lily graduated with a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and a MSc in Creative Writing with Distinction at the University of Edinburgh. They are the founder of Alba Writing Club. She lives in Scotland with her familiar, the most fearsome cat criminal, Outlaw. Find them @journalingirl or @albawritingclub. Join Lily for Writing World-Connected Characters (19 November).

Emma Gomis is a Catalan American poet, essayist, and researcher. Her book, Recupera, was published by the87Press in February 2025. She has also published four pamphlets of poetry, two of which were cowritten with Anne Waldman. She is a coeditor of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archives (Nightboat Books, 2022) and Manifold, a journal of experimental criticism. In 2020, she was selected by Patricia Spears as The Poetry Project’s Brannan Prize winner. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School, where she was also a fellowship recipient, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in contemporary feminist art writing. Join Emma for Elemental Ecopoetics (starting 9 October, 4-week course).

Char Heather is a writer, researcher and facilitator concerned with how embodied experiences can shape narrative forms. Char founded 'the remote body' in 2020, a project that hosts arts and literature events online that centre sick, crip and disabled folk. They are in the final year of their PhD that looks at the innovative potential of chronic illness literature, while redrafting a novel on crip and queer care. Char's creative and critical work has been published in The Polyphony, FUTCH Press, The New Gothic Review and Lassitude, among others, and regular writing on crip concerns is published monthly in 'the remote body' substack. You can find them @charheatherr and @theremotebody on Instagram. Join Char for Decomposed: Playing with Narrative Shape & Embodied Practise (starting 3 June, 4-week course).

Sonika Jaiganesh is a poet, medical student, and editor of All Existing magazine. Their literary interests lie in the unconventional, subversive, and queer; and their pedagogy centres on learning while doing: dissecting, analysing, and reassembling a concept. Join Sonika for Kigo, Kireji, Karumi…the Haiku Moment (8 November).

Gayathiri Kamalakanthan is a Tamil poet and performer. Their work has been awarded the Disabled Poets Prize, the Faber & Andlyn Publisher's Prize and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. An alumna of the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective, Gayathiri runs Word-Benders, a poetry workshop centering trans and queer poets of colour. Their novel-in-verse, Bad Queer, is forthcoming with Faber. gayathiri.co.uk, @unembarrassable. Join Gayathiri for Hybridizing (8 October).

Madeleine Kaye is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. Her practice incorporates poetry, prose, sculpture, and installation, with concern to themes of intimacy, contradiction, femininity, and the olfactory. She has been published in The Yellow Paper, Seeing Through Words, and Big Red Cat, and has also exhibited at Generator Projects, Summerhall Arts, and Hidden Door Festival. She has run various creative workshops using scent and the olfactory as both a material and medium. She graduated from the Fine Art BA course at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, and is currently studying on the MLitt Art Writing program at The Glasgow School of Art. Join Madeleine for Embodied Scents (18 October).

Aude Konan is a writer and workshop facilitator. Aude wrote My little sister (Ma petite soeur), her first novel, at only 12 years old. It was published by the publishing company Dagan. Aude is an award-winning writer, and writes scripts as well as articles for British, French and American magazines such as Complex UK, Style Caster, Gal-Dem, Okay Africa, and The Guardian. She likes to write in different languages for no reason. Her newest book has just been released, a bilingual short stories collection called Solitudes. Aude designs and leads creative communications training and workshops in the UK and Europe for organizations such as Expedia, UK Black Pride, Amnesty International, Stonewall, Livity, etc. Aude’s workshops explores many themes such as Writing as self care, Writing as a form of activism, Writing about hair, etc. As a filmmaker, her short film Rabbits was screened at the Helsinki Illumination Film Festival in 2015. Her newest short film, Pearls, Pearls, a coming of age movie about young girls dealing with street harassment, was selected for the Bafta-qualifying festival Iris Prize, Wxool festival, the Diaspora festival of Black and Independent film 2023, and the Chicago Indie film awards 2023. Join Aude for Fighting Linguistic Genocide through Words (starting 13 March, 4-week course).

Valeria Levi is a dancer, writer and workshop facilitator in dance and creative writing based in Glasgow. Graduating in Theatre and Philosophy in 2021, Valeria has worked as a freelancer and shared her practice within a wide range of contexts since then. Inclusion and working with nature are key-values in her practice. Valeria has worked in several community arts projects both in Italy and Scotland (Culture Collective, Gruppo Abele and Libera) and has devoted her passion for engaging with younger and older generations as well as people from different social backgrounds to make art accessible for everyone. Valeria also collaborated with the inclusive dance company Indepen-dance and created dancework with disabled dancers. Valeria created her first artistic work "Listen to the Forest", an experimental performance blending movement, spoken word, BSL and music to give the forests a space to be listened to, and “Not Far from the Forest”, a hands-on workshop for anyone to share a creative space with the forest. Valeria believes that art is a privileged medium to access the voice of Nature within ourselves and create a bridge of communication where both voices can be heard and respected. Join Valeria for Not Far from the Forest (21 June).

Tom McLaughlin is a Derry-born poet who grew up on both sides of the Irish border. His debut pamphlet, Open Houses, was published by Marble Press in 2021 and his full-length collection is forthcoming with Arachne Press. He completed an MA in Creative Writing with distinction at Royal Holloway and is now completing a PhD on queer domesticity and poetic form at Surrey University. His poems have recently appeared in anthologies by Broken Sleep and Arachne Press. In 2024 he was highly commended in the Bridport Prize, as well as winning the Spelt Magazine and Cannon. Join Tom for Queering Home (10 March).

Hazel McMichael is an antidisciplinary writer, researcher, and educator based in Brighton and London, UK. Hazel has delivered poetry readings, talks, performances, and screenings at literary festivals, open mics, theatres, galleries, universities, nightclubs, and city streets, among other places. Hazel was awarded a PhD in 2023 for a thesis on ventriloquism, feminism, and conceptualism. Recent and forthcoming essay publications focus on sound, sexuality, and trauma. Current writing projects include a series of lyric essays on chronic illness, divination, and secrecy. Hazel has facilitated discussions, seminars, and workshops in a range of community, museum, nonprofit, and university settings, including undergraduate courses in art history and visual culture. Alongside running writing workshops, co-hosting the Radical Care Reading Group, and delivering training on care experience, Hazel is currently undertaking a disability focused curatorial fellowship with Screen South at Charleston. www.hazelmcmichael.com. Join Hazel for Making Oracles (starting 6 May, 4-week course).

Natascha Nanji is an artist and writer based in London-UK. Her research based practice orbits migrations, nomadism, systemic flows & transmutations, unearthing speculative histories from the past and the future. Natascha performs essays and stories at art events and conferences and publishes writing in art and design journals. She has a background in anthropology and studied cultural criticism at the RCA and is the co-editor/publisher of LAY IT ON THICK, an international literary magazine about desire and erotics. Join Natascha for Welcome to Studio Swan: An Exercise in Collaborative Speculation (11 December).

Linh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Canadian immigrant and author who writes children’s literature and creative non-fiction. Her debut middle-grade fantasy novel, No Place Like Home, was released in 2023 with HarperCollins Canada and Inkyard Press. Linh holds an H.B.A. in English from the University of Toronto and an MPhil in Arts, Creativity and Education from the University of Cambridge. She is currently in her PhD at Cambridge, studying love as epistemology towards feminist and decolonial knowledge-making at the Faculty of Education. Linh’s academic work has been shared at conferences in New York City, Vancouver, Cambridge, Rouen, and more. Her MPhil research was showcased as a digital arts exhibit and is currently on display at the University of Toronto. She has also been leading creative writing workshops since 2020. Linh’s work can be found at www.linhsnguyen.com or more frequently on Instagram @linh.s.nguyen. Join Linh for Diffracting Love (starting 18 March, 4-week course).

J. Yuru Zhou / 周玉茹 is trying to piece together some fragments. Their poems and essays have been presented in exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, Gray Area, Southern Exposure; performances for Litquake, Berkeley Poetry Festival; publications with The Seventh Wave, The Poetry Project, Kernel Magazine, Inverse Magazine, The Ecopoetry Anthology, AND the Los Angeles Times. With Kazumi Chin, she co-stewards Flowers & Fields (www.flowersandfields.org), a literary collective dedicated to the incubation of a more radical Asian American politics and poetics in the Bay Area. Find her online: www.mooncasted.work. Join Jessica for Girlblogging Poetics (25 November).

Laura Palau Barreda │ Born and raised in a rural community in the Catalan countryside, I continue to harvest olives with my family, a tradition spanning generations. My artistic practice is shaped by feminist, Indigenous, and rural knowledge, drawing from land-based teachings and the complexities of agriculture. Growing up amid both environmental stewardship and systemic exploitation, I became attuned to the tensions between productivity-driven economies and ecological balance. Navigating the divide between rural and urban worlds, I see myself as a mediator—a bridge between hands-on knowledge and intellectual discourse. Through photography, film, sculpture, and performance, my work fosters connections between embodied, lived experience and theoretical inquiry. Despite efforts by thinkers like Donna Haraway, Paulo Freire, and Robin Wall Kimmerer to integrate practical knowledge into academic spaces, Western institutions often prioritize abstract, rationalist frameworks. My practice challenges this separation, creating spaces where relational, land-rooted knowledge can flourish alongside contemporary artistic and intellectual traditions. Join Laura for Grafting Ecofeminist Strategies (starting 15 November, 3-week course).

Radha Patel is a storyteller whose work intersects across colonialism, nature, religion, rituals, language, folklore and speculative futures. Writing is at the heart of her practise so any work that she makes always involves a text, alongside a physical or tangible element that people can interact with such as sculptures, prints, drawings, audio, installations, films and an invented language called Etsolstera. Throughout history, humans have travelled fluidly between our world and the ‘underworlds’ or ‘otherworlds’. Folklore tells us so much about what we can learn from these travels including how people resisted colonisation, re-built what was destroyed and practised solidarity with other species. Radha’s practise explores folklore throughout history, and uses storytelling to build new ways of re-connecting us to our human ancestors, our ancestors that are other species and all the delicate magic that is being lost through colonisation. She works with older and existing folklore from Wales and India and also creates new folklore about rituals, magical objects, imagined lands and new planets. https://www.radhapatel.co.uk. Join Radha for The Bird that Brings Hope (7 June).

Relatively Queer is facilitated by Dr Lloyd Meadbh Houston, a genderqueer, neurodivergent academic and writer based at the University of Cambridge, K Angel, an autistic, kinky, trans/non-binary writer, performer, and researcher from the American Midwest, and Erica ‘ERN’ Rivera, a transpunk latine/x performance writer, editor, and collage artist based in Los Angeles. Join them for Relatively Queer (14 June).

Supriya Rakesh is a fiction writer, poet, creative facilitator and improviser. Her writing is recently published in Litro, Kitaab, Setu Bilingual, Borderless journal and a South Asian anthology on gendered violence. In her workshops and courses, she explores the relationship between personal reflexivity and creative practice. She draws upon art, theatre and narrative approaches to cultivate playful, nourishing spaces for self-exploration and dialogue. Supriya holds a PhD in Organisational Behaviour and is a Visiting Professor at TISS, Mumbai. She currently lives in Amsterdam where she is dabbling in improv theatre and working on her novel. Discover more about her work at www.supriyarakesh.com. Join Supriya for Where is My Dragon? Creative Resilience in Uncertain Times (5 April).

JP Seabright (she/they) is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall (Beir Bua Press, 2021 and Sunday Mornings at the River, 2023); No Holds Barred (Lupercalia Press, 2022); The Insomniac’s Almanac (kith books, 2023); Traum/A (fifthwheelpress, 2023) and four collaborative works: GenderFux (Nine Pens Press, 2022), MACHINATIONS (Trickhouse Press, 2022), MotherFlux (Nine Pens Press, 2024) and Not Your Orlando (Punk Dust Poetry, 2024). Their first full collection White Cloud Over Purple was published by Atomic Bohemian in 2024. JP explores themes of gender, sexuality, trauma, technology and the climate crisis in her work spanning poetry, prose, experimental and audio/visual pieces. Their pamphlets have been shortlisted (twice) for Best Collaborative Work in the Saboteur Awards, as well prose and poetry being nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and (twice) a Forward Prize. They are co-editor and organiser of the Arts Council England-funded project eff-able. More info at https://jpseabright.com. Join JP for Disruption! Queering Form (2 April).

Nicky Torode is a career and entrepreneurial mindset coach, journaling facilitator and creative writing educator. She teaches a range of courses for educational providers including, recently, New Writing South, Workers Education Association, East Sussex Libraries and her own private groups. She loves fragmentary and experimental forms of writing and stories of place and belonging. Her stories are published in The London Writers’ Salon Anthology (2024), Phare Literary Journal (2023) Elsewhere, a journal of place (July 2022), Vine Leaves Press (May 2022) and Mum Life Stories anthology (2022). She was highly commended and a prize-winner in the top four at Hastings Book Festival (2022). She has an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes and is a professional coach, credentialled by the International Coaching Federation. Earlier, she worked abroad for a decade in education and human rights, including in Russia, and on many Roma rights projects in Central and Eastern Europe. She’s a volunteer workshop leader for Street Wisdom, a creative thinking walking experience! @nickytorode, www.diamond-minds.co.uk. Join Nicky for Tell It Slant (starting 7 October, 4-week course).

Jess Wright (she/they) is a writer, historian, and teacher. Jess’s work, which includes cut-ups, essays, fiction, and poetry, has appeared in publications such as Foglifter Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Queerlings Magazine, and Write or Die. They have written two books: Psychiatry: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic) and The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity (UC Press). Jess teaches academic writing in the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Leeds and runs community-based workshops on creative writing, zine-making, and found text. When not writing, teaching, or thinking about sea creatures and the weirdness of bodies, Jess can be found outside with her girlfriend, trying to turn the remains of their lawn into a food forest. Find Jess on BlueSky @sublunam.bsky.social or at jessica-wright.co.uk. Join Jess for Exploring Hermit Crabs as Queer Forms (starting 7 May, 4-week course).