Joelle Taylor
Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring.
She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. She served as Editor of Out-Spoken Press in 2021.
''Songs My Enemy Taught Me' is a collection of poems themed around the experiences of women globally, but it had simple beginnings. It began with me. It began with a small child in a hotel room not wanting to speak. It began with opera, but the kind that cannot be heard. It began at the point at which I ended.
This is a book about colonisation and terrorism, about invasion and ownership. It is a survival manual, a map, a photograph, a song. It is internet at 2am. It is the way your mother just looked at you. It is the way the girl in front of you on the soft journey home just reached for her keys. It is your hand reaching for keys.'
''Songs My Enemy Taught Me' is a collection of poems themed around the experiences of women globally, but it had simple beginnings. It began with me. It began with a small child in a hotel room not wanting to speak. It began with opera, but the kind that cannot be heard. It began at the point at which I ended.
This is a book about colonisation and terrorism, about invasion and ownership. It is a survival manual, a map, a photograph, a song. It is internet at 2am. It is the way your mother just looked at you. It is the way the girl in front of you on the soft journey home just reached for her keys. It is your hand reaching for keys.'
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7–28 APRIL 2026
TUTORS: JOELLE TAYLOR, ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU
WORKSHOPS: TUES 7-9PM UK
Writing poems that talk truth to power or address the state of the nation can often be tricky to navigate. Either a poem is so direct it ends up feeling didactic or it's so subtle it doesn't have the push and bite it needs to make its case.
PLAYBACK: RECORDING-ONLY ACCESS – If you’re unable to attend the course, we are pleased to make available PLAYBACK Recording-Only access – with recording-only access you’ll receive links to the password-protected video recordings of each workshop by email the next day, together with all course materials.
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Duration: 8 × 2hr workshops
Tutors: Joelle Taylor, Malika Booker
Originally delivered in January 2025, with 8 two-hour workshops, covering subjects from ‘Details, Imagery, Description, Deskwork- a process of making, gathering, carving, and discarding’ to ‘Sonnet and Ghazal, and modern variations of these forms’.
PLAYBACK: RECORDING-ONLY ACCESS – with recording-only access you’ll receive links to the password-protected video recordings of each workshop, together with all tutor course materials.
Duration: 9 × 2hr workshops
Tutors: Malika Booker, Joelle Taylor and Pascale Petit.
Originally delivered in Summer 2025, with nine two-hour workshops (three from each tutor) covering subjects from ‘Mapping For Memories – Creating Narrative Poems’ to ‘Musicality and the Line’, ‘Writing the Self: Metaphor’ to ‘Poetry and the Visual Arts’, the Academy Plus course with Malika Booker, Joelle Taylor and Pascale Petit offers an exploration of craft and wealth of generative inspiration.
PLAYBACK: RECORDING-ONLY ACCESS – with recording-only access you’ll receive links to the password-protected video recordings of each workshop, together with over 150 pages of course materials.
All five of the titles published under Joelle Taylor’s editorship, for a special price of £35:
Cane, Corn & Gully - Safiya Kamaria Whitaker (formerly Kinshasa)
Fetch Your Mother’s Heart - lisa luxx
flinch & air- Laura Jane Lee
Somewhere Something is Burning - Alice Frecknall
Caviar - Sarah Fletcher