New Poets Collective
Supporting emerging poets from diverse backgrounds
With support from the TS Eliot Foundation, our New Poets Collective recruits a new cohort of poets every year, helping them to hone their voice.
AC Smith
AC Smith is a dramatic poet. Originally from Colorado, she now makes her home in London. Her writing has won awards from the Royal Shakespeare Company and Soho Theatre. She has created work for the Bush Theatre, HighTide, RADA, BBC World Service, Globe Theatre, and the Old Vic. She has a specialism in cross-medium experimentation, particularly working with dance and movement companies. She is also passionate about transforming real life stories into art. Current projects include: an autobiographical multimedia performance for CRIPtic Arts about her experiences with cancer, and a new musical with composer Bella Barlow, supported by the Jane Goodman Trust. She is a Co-founder of London Playwrights Workshop and has taught playwriting at RADA and the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. She is represented by Rachel Daniels at Berlin Associates
Annina Zheng-Hardy
Annina Zheng-Hardy is a poet and fiction writer.
Christy Ku
Christy Ku is a Hong Kong-born, London-based multidisciplinary creative, focusing on poetry, acting and workshop facilitation. Ku’s work focuses on empowering creative confidence for all across industries and backgrounds.
Ku has worked with organisations including the BBC, Sky Arts, Apples & Snakes and the Barbican on projects such as poetry films, spoken word tracks and theatre shows. She is an alum of the Barbican Young Poets, New Earth Theatre Academy and the National Youth Theatre. She is the founder of BESEA Poets, a platform for British-based East and South East Asian poets.
Erica Hesketh
Erica Hesketh’s poems have appeared in The North, Acumen, Ink Sweat & Tears, Propel, PERVERSE, harana poetry and The Friday Poem among others. She placed second in the 2022 Winchester Poetry Prize, and was commended in the 2023 Magma Poetry Competition (Editors’ Prize) and the 2023 Stanza Competition. She is the Director of the Poetry Translation Centre, a London-based charity which champions poets from around the world in English translation.
Gayathiri Kamalakanthan
Gayathiri Kamalakanthan is a Tamil poet and sex educator. They’re interested in how language shapes childhood and how we might use it to queer the future. Kamalakanthan won the Faber & Andlyn Publisher’s Prize, the Primadonna Fiction Prize and placed second in the MONO Prize. They’re a co-author of Sex Ed: An Inclusive Teenage Guide to Sex and Relationships. Kamalakanthan has performed with the Roundhouse, DAYTIMERS and UK Black Pride and their debut play PERIOD PARRRTY is in development with Kali Theatre. Kamalakanthan's debut novel in verse is forthcoming with Faber.
Kamalakanthan is an alum of Griots Well, London Library Emerging Writers and Diversifying Children’s Literature with Apples & Snakes. They run the poetry workshops WORD-BENDERS at The Common Press and Queer Poetry Sauna at Hackney Sauna Baths. With DYCP they're deepening their practice within the decolonial creative classroom; they’ve spoken on decolonising storytelling, queerness and sex education with the Barbican, Colours Youth Network, Sex Money Power with Sara Pascoe, and BBC Radio London.
Johanna Gibson
Johanna Gibson is a writer from the Virgin Islands (UK). She received her bachelor’s in English from the University of Southampton. She has previously been published in Moko Magazine, Pree Lit and Persimmon Review. She was shortlisted for the Bocas Emerging Writer’s Fellowship (2022), shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2023) and is an alumnus of the Obsidian Foundation Retreat 2023.
Jordan Hayward
Jordan Hayward is a poet from Preston, now based in Manchester. He is a founder and curator of Basket, an event series in Manchester for poetry, art, sound and performance. His poetry has appeared in publications including The Rialto and bath magg.
Kaz Reeves
Kaz Reeves is a grandmother and mother who, through her work as a priest in parish communities and hospital chaplaincies, has gained a deep appreciation for the diverse richness of spiritual life. Her enjoyment particularly lies in the African diaspora communities, to which she feels greatly indebted, especially in her more recent work over the past 15 years. Raised in foster care, Reeves has channelled her passion into advocating for children’s wellbeing. She fondly recalls the challenges and rewards of her former roles in community health and women’s mental health.
For Reeves, her 40 years of engagement in community projects means that poetry is as much a communal endeavour as it is a personal one. She expresses her interests through writing, contributing to publications such as the Asylum Journal and The Coracle. Her collaborations extend to the Iona Community, where she continues to weave her personal experiences into her work.
Kit Griffiths
Kit Griffiths is an artist, film-maker and poet, working for real intimacy through mercy and redemption. Griffiths’ first poetry pamphlet was published with Earthbound Press in 2020, and they recently won third prize in the 2023 Poetry Wales annual international competition.
With DYCP support from Arts Council England, Griffiths is currently building their first full collection, a set of family portraits called Delusions of Grandma. Rooted in the idea/action of returning to and choosing your birth family after estrangement, this work combines poetry with visual arts, and is being shown as a solo project at Quench Gallery Margate in April 2024.
Leah Mihalska
Leah Mihalska is a part-time poet and full-time tired. She is interested in heart-breaking and heart-repairing (poetry as therapy) and the intersection of poetry with other art forms such as music, comedy and collective action.
Luigi Coppola
Luigi Coppola is a teacher, poet, DIY music producer and multimedia artist (recording and performing as The Only Emperor), first-generation immigrant and avid rum and coke drinker. A graduate of the Warwick University Creative writing programme, he is Bridport Prize shortlisted, Ledbury and National Poetry Competition longlisted, has been included in the Poetry Archive Worldview winner’s list.
His publications include Worple Press’s anthology The Tree Line as well as print and online journals including Acumen, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Iota, Magma, Rattle and Rialto. He has performed poetry and music across the UK, including at the Poetry & Words tent at Glastonbury, literature festivals in Brighton, Coventry and London, and numerous events, slams and open mics. In 2022 he collaborated with the American singer Kyla Gabka on her debut album Waiting for Autumn and is working towards a first collection of poetry and further music releases that will at some point signal the end of days.
Melanie Banim
Melanie Banim is a writer, poet and educator from Liverpool, who focuses on stitching silenced women and children’s (hi)stories into her work, the Irish diaspora, and exploring how families have the ability to do – and undo – harm.
In 2022, Banim was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and, in 2023, highly commended in the Manchester Poetry Prize. She is published in Sentinel Literary Journal (winning both first prize and highly commended) and New Voices Rise. In 2023, Banim was long-listed for the Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Prize, Plaza and Cúirt prizes, and was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Prize. In June 2023, Banim was also shortlisted for Northern Writers’ Awards Debut Poet of the Year.
Since 2022, Banim has been an Emerging Writer at The London Library, and is the only writer selected from 900 applicants who is based in the North of England. Banim also writes on the six month Stinging Fly fiction programme at Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, and was chosen for their poetry Summer School. Banim was selected to write and perform a poem for City of Light, an immersive exhibition on a lake as part of Writing on the Wall Festival 2019, which attracted over a thousand visitors.
Beyond writing, Banim leads a programme for emerging artists and music professionals at Sound City and in her work in higher education, she leads arts-focused strategy and student support. Banim has developed short films for television with disadvantaged young people, and delivered reading projects with marginalised communities. She is working on both a poetry and short story collection, between Liverpool, Dublin and London. Her Bildungsroman poems explore themes of class, how people interact with place, and the unsayable.
Michaela Coplen
Michaela Coplen is an American poet living in London. In 2013 she was appointed a National Student Poet in the US. Her poems have been published in Adroit, The Atlantic, The London Magazine, Poets.org, and Rialto. She won the 2019 Troubadour International Poetry Prize, the 2020 York Poetry Prize, and features in Here: Poems for the Planet and the 2020 Best New Poets anthology. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Finishing School, was published by ignitionpress in 2022.
Patrick Romero McCafferty
Patrick Romero McCafferty’s poetry focuses on land, journeys, and homes. It has appeared in recent issues of Rialto, Gutter, Butcher's Dog, Stand, Magma, and Oxford Review of Books. In 2023 he was shortlisted for a New Writers Award and the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize. In 2022 he was a Roddy Lumsden Memorial Mentee.
With the band Anoraq, he hosts Inside Voices, a monthly night of poetry and music at King Tut’s in Glasgow. As a vocalist he has performed alongside acts including LYR and Frankie Stew & Harvey Gunn as well as at Hidden Door, Great Western Festival, New Year Revolutions, and First Footing. He has also read at showcases at Summerhall in Edinburgh (SPAMzine) and Balliol College, Oxford (Oxford Review of Books).
McCafferty is editing the Latinx Issue of Wet Grain alongside Leo Boix and Dr Nat Teitler. His Spanish translation of Ellen Renton’s spoken word theatre piece Within Sight first appeared at the Otros Territorios Film Festival 2021 in Mexico City. He has also written reviews for Poetry London and SPAM.
Pẹ̀lúmi Obasaju
Pẹ̀lúmi Obasaju is a Nigerian-British scientist and storyteller who brings poetry into the day to day. An experienced performer, she has been commissioned for several projects including an AR candle with New York-based Spoken Flames, the consecration of the first Black bishop of the Diocese of London, and the Royal African Society 120th anniversary gala. She was part of the 2022/23 Poetry Translation Centre UNDERTOW cohort, performing at Lagos International Poetry Festival 2023. In 2021, her self-published pamphlet, Love LETTERS & HEART Ramblings, debuted at number 3 on Amazon Christian Poetry. Her work has also appeared in Magma 86: Food.
William Wyld
William Wyld is a poet and visual artist from south London. Costume and identity are central to their work, which blurs distinctions between real and imagined voices, and is preoccupied with grief, sexuality and the human relationship to the natural world.
Wyld has performed at the National Poetry Library, Wilderness festival and poetry nights around London. Their poetry has appeared in Lighthouse, Queer Life Queer Love II, The Live Canon Sonnet Anthology and was highly commended in the Bridport Prize 2023. Their paintings have been exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show and Discerning Eye exhibitions.
A carpenter by trade, Wyld has worked on large scale installations at theatres and museums around the country. Between construction projects they make and exhibit paintings, masks and costumes out of their workshop in Greenwich.
Applications are now closed for the New Poets Collective 2023/24
Please do keep an eye out in April 2024 for when we re-open applications for 2024/25.
If you have any queries about the New Poets Collective, or questions about your application, please contact the Creative Engagement Manager (Emerging Artists).