York Explore Library :

Thu 24 Jan :

6.45pm – 7.45pm :

£3/£2 with a YorkCard

Finding the Words is a regular poetry evening every month at York Explore Library. Each evening brings together three poets and we aim to include both published writers and those working towards a collection. We’ll have a bar available and readings last around an hour. The evening is also a chance to share and chat, so please feel free to bring any news or information about poetry local, regional or national.

John Foggin lives in Ossett, West Yorkshire. His work has appeared in The North, The New Writer, Prole, and The interpreters house, among others, and in anthologies including The Forward Book of Poetry [2015, 2018]. He publishes a poetry blog: the great fogginzo’s cobweb.
His poems have won first prizes in The Plough Poetry [2013,2014], the Camden/Lumen [2014], and McClellan [2015] Competitions respectively. In 2016 he was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition judged by Billy Collins.
He has had published four pamphlets/chapbooks: Running out of Space [2014] Backtracks [2015], Larach (WardWood Publications) [2015] and Outlaws and fallen angels (Calder Valley Poetry) [2016], and two collections, Much Possessed (smith|doorstop) [2016], and Gap Year..co-authored with Andy Blackford (SPM Publications) [2017]
A new pamphlet ‘Advice to a traveller’ is published by Indigo Dreams [2018].

Andy Armitage is a poet and editor from Leeds. His first chapbook ‘Letters to a First Love from the Future’ was published in July 2018.
Andy has a PhD in English and has published poetry in Acumen, Dream Catcher, Strix, Riggwelter, The High Window, and Algebra of Owls. In 2017, he won First Place in the Leeds Museums Poetry Competition and this year he was Highly Commended in the York Mix/York Literature Festival Poetry Competition. He’s written scholarly articles on Ted Hughes’s poetry for the British Library and the Ted Hughes society websites.

Joan Johnston was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and lives on Tyneside. She has worked as a writer in hospitals, prisons, day-centres and schools and with the homeless, women’s groups, and older people in residential care. She is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship and teaches creative writing in Adult Education and on a freelance basis.
She has published three poetry collections and three pamphlets – her latest pamphlet An Overtaking was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2016. Her poems have also been widely published in magazines and anthologies – most recently in Land of Three Rivers (pub. Bloodaxe, 2018)
‘Joan Johnston knows what poetry can do. She reveals wonder inherent in the everyday. I like her work very much’. – Kathleen Jamie

Please visit our ticketing website to book a place.