What makes a poem burn in your memory long after you’ve finished reading it? Learn the ingredients to craft poems that linger.

Liz Berry - award winning poet and author

Liz Berry is an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed collections Black Country (Chatto, 2014); The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto, 2018); The Dereliction (Hercules Editions, 2021) a collaboration with artist Tom Hicks; and most recently The Home Child (Chatto, 2023), a novel in verse. Liz’s work, described as “a sooty soaring hymn to her native West Midlands” (Guardian), celebrates the landscape, history and dialect of the region. Liz has received the Somerset Maugham Award, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Writers' Prize and two Forward Prizes. Her poem ‘Homing’, a love poem for the language of the Black Country, is part of the GCSE English syllabus. Liz is a patron of Writing West Midlands and lives in Birmingham with her family.

Michael Lavers is the author of three poetry collections, After Earth and The Inextinguishable, both published by the University of Tampa Press, and Unspoken, forthcoming from Cloudbank Books. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.

​Kizziah Burton is a graduate fellow of The University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Her poems have received honors such as Montreal International Poetry Prize First,

Mslexia Poetry Prize Second, Forward Prizes Best Single Poem Shortlist, Ledbury Poetry

Prize Second, Tom Howard Poetry Prize First; Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award

Finalist; Highly Commended in the National Poetry Competition, Gregory O’ Donoghue

Competition, Manchester, Magma, Bridport and Oxford Poetry Prizes;  Aesthetica Creative

Writing Award Shortlist; Sewanee Writers’ Conference poet; and educational grants

from The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Foundation Los Angeles.

Run by international creative writing competition The Bridport Prize. Previous winners include Kate Atkinson and Kit de Waal. Discover more at www.bridportprize.org.uk

Poetry Toolkit