I present a series of evenings at our partner venue, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, under the heading “Carol Ann Duffy and Friends”. These evenings featuring guest appearances from poets of national stature reading alongside the best students and graduates from our MFA and MA Creative Writing: Poetry programme. This gives our students the experience of taking part in a professionally-staged literary event, and helps them to develop their skills in presenting their work to a public audience. In 2018 I started the People’s Poetry Lectures: today’s leading writers talking about their favourite poets at Manchester’s iconic Principal Hotel.

I am Creative Director of the Manchester Children’s Book Festival, which is hosted and run by the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met and delivered in partnership with many of the major cultural and educational organisations across Manchester. My ambition is that is should be a festival for everyone with year-round events and special projects designed to raise aspirations and confidence in young people, offer project-based placements and festival management experience to our students, and to encourage the broadest possible audience to engage with literature, the arts, and opportunities for creative expression. 

I have run several Laureate Education Projects from Manchester Met:

Anthologise, which saw schools selecting their favourite poetry, the winning anthology published by Picador with a foreword by the Duchess of Cornwall;

Mother Tongue, Other Tongue, which encourages children with English as a second language to express themselves and share poetry written in their mother tongue, and students who are native English speakers to experiment with writing in a learned language, now a national campaign run annually;

Poetry Together, a competition for the best poems written by collaboratively by people from different generations, designed to encourage intergenerational conversations and working with the Co-Op’s campaign to combat loneliness in communitites;

Let in the Stars, designed to find, celebrate and share the best new poetry written for children; a competition to encourage and gather new poems resulted in a collection of work by international poets which was short-listed for the CLPE award and instigated a national Arts Council funded campaign to reinvorgate the publishing of new poetry for children.

Postgraduate teaching

MA Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop

Creative Writing, Poetry, Writing for Children