Featured Poet – John Whitworth
John Whitworth has published ten books of poems and one about how to
write them. His poems are published in magazines worldwide. He has won
(among others) the Literary Review Annual Prize, the Peterloo Prize (twice),
the Writers' Workshop prize and the Eleanor Room Prize from the University
of Lamar in Texas. His latest collection, Girlie Gangs was published in 2012.
At the conference, Whitworth will conduct a three-day workshop entitled
Rhyme and Reason. He offers this description: Since my early twenties I
have been writing poems, there must be seven or eight hundred by now. All of them rhyme and
scan, not because I think other forms of poetry worthless, but because I can write no other way. I
am offering a workshop for those who want to write that way and those who already do. I will
attempt to share what skills I have and perhaps learn some things I do not now know from the
participants. Participants will write some poems but I am sure they will be happy to do that.