EASTSIDE ARTS FESTIVAL: Work, Place and Language

The Thomas Carnduff Appreciation Society Summer Yard Session.  With the generous help and support from EastSide Partnership the TCAS will be holding our first summer poetry 'Yard Session' as part of East Belfast Arts festival on Saturday 29th July 19.00 Templemore (Victorian Baths) community conference centre East Belfast. Having a great lineup of local and international authors celebrating the rich literature and language traditions of East Belfast and our shared Isles... this is the one literature event not to be missed. Proudly marking the inaugural opening of the refurbished 120 seater conference centre as part of the Templemore Baths site. Dr Connal Parr will be chairing the panel discussion on the theme of the event (work, place and language in the life of the poet) our host for the evening will be author Lisa Currie. Fantastic line up of established authors will share their work and thoughts, Rosemary Jenkinson, Gaynor Kane, Elizabeth McKeown. Mark Ward is a Dublin based contemporary poet along with international poet Malcolm Guite and many other guests. Tickets for the event are on sale from EastSide Arts Festival website. Thickets are available EastSide Art

Yellow House Publishing Ltd are proudly sponsoring the Thomas Carnduff Summer Yard Session 2023 poetry competition. Open to all resident writers living on the Island of Ireland only. We welcome submissions in English, Irish and Ulster Scots on the theme of the event (work, place and language). There will be three prizes; book vouchers and shields for the winners of the competition. 1st prize £50, 2nd prize £30, 3rd prize £20. All winning poems will be published in New Isles Press autumn issue 2. Please send your poems through our submission page on YHP website. Competition is open from 1st June to the 30th June. The editorial team at YHP will be judging the work and each entrant is allowed to submit one new poem that has not been previously published or is awaiting consideration for publishing. Yellow House Publishing Ltd supports Free Speech within Common Law and the rights of the artist as an autonomous human statement. #EastSidepoetry 

Malcolm Guite books include Sounding the Seasons; Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year(Canterbury 2012). The Singing Bowl; Collected Poems (Canterbury 2013) and Parable and Paradox (Canterbury Press 2016) and Mariner: AVoyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder 2017) After Prayer(Canterbury Press 2019) and The Word Within the Words (DLT 2021)and Lifting The Veil, Square Halo, 2021. He has a Youtube series called‘A Spell in the Library’.

Elizabeth McGeown is a Pushcart-nominated poet from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has work published in journals including Banshee, Poetry Wales and Under the Radar. She is the 2022 UK Slam Champion and was longlisted in the Saboteur Awards 2022 for ‘Best Spoken Word Performer’. She won the Cúirt International Festival of Literature: Spoken Word Platform 2019 and the Cursed Murphy Spoken Word Prize 2019. She is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. Her first poetry collection 'Cockroach' was published by Verve Poetry Press in summer 2022.

Mark Ward is the author of the collection Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and four chapbooks: Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Carcass (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020), the prose/haiku/hybrid HIKE (Bear Creek Press, 2022) and the Choose Your Own Adventure sonnet, Faultlines (voidspace, online 2022/print 2023). His poems have been featured in The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Banshee, Crannóg, Southword, Skylight47, The Honest Ulsterman, ROPES, fourteen poems, Softblow and many more, as well as anthologies, the most recent of which is Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry. He was Highly Commended in the 2019 and 2022 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Awards, and in 2020 was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series. In 2021 and 2022, he was awarded bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland. He has recorded poems for RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena and The Poetry Programme, Lyric FM’s Poetry File and the podcast Words Lightly Spoken. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry, now in its seventh year. Twitter: @dogwithoutlegs / Instagram: @faekplastiksteev  

Rosemary Jenkinson was born in Belfast and is an award winning playwright whose and short-story author. She won the 2001 Black Hill Magazine Short Story Competition, third prize in the Brian Moore Short Story award and was shortlisted for the 2002 Hennessy Award for new writing. Her most recent play 'Billy Boy' was launched at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Rosemary new collection of short stories 'Love in a Time of Chaos'.

Gaynor Kane is from East Belfast. Her full collection, ‘Venus in Pink Marble’ was released on her 50 th birthday in 2020, published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press. She has four other publications, from the same press: a micro-collection, ‘Circling the Sun’ (2018), about the early aviatrixes, a chapbook, ‘Memory Forest’ (2019), about burial rituals and last wishes, a co-authored chapbook of pandemic poetry ‘PennedIn’ with Karen Mooney (2020); and a collection of love poems ‘Eight Types of Love’(2022).Gaynor’s poems have earned places in several competitions. She has been guest editor of the Bangor Literary Journal and The Storms Journal. She has also performed at several festivals, including the Belfast Book Festival, Stendhal Music and Arts Festival & Cheltenham Poetry Festival and a judge for the North Carolina Poetry Society.