Details of our payment and cancellation policy can be found in our Terms & Conditions. Instalment payments available – select Klarna at Checkout. If Klarna is not available in your location and/or you would prefer to pay in instalments via PayPal’s Pay in 3, please check out via this page: Academy Pay in 3.

Academy Plus – Summer 2025

Dates: 16 June – 11 August 2025
Duration: 9 weeks
Tutors: Malika Booker, Joelle Taylor, Pascale Petit
Course fee: £400
One-to-ones: Optional, 30-minute, £50 each

The Academy Plus programme offers the chance to continue working with our tutors over a longer period at a less intensive pace. 

The course will run for 9 weeks (Mon 16 June – Mon 11 August) with a two-hour online group workshop each Monday, 7-9pm UK and divided between your three tutors, with each tutor leading 3 weeks. 

As with all our Academy courses, you’ll be provided with session recordings, password-protected on our Vimeo, for your future reference, as well as access to a Padlet for materials.

Optional individual one-to-ones: In addition to the weekly workshops, we’re able to offer individual 30-minute one-to-ones with each tutor during their teaching weeks. One-to-ones can be booked at a standalone fee of £50 per tutorial, and are subject to availability.

Malika Booker

Malika Booker is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). The Anthology - Two Young, Two Black, Too Different, Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen was recently published to celebrate Malika Poetry Kitchen’s twenty-year anniversary. Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). Booker and Shara McCallum recently co-edited the issue of Stand Journal curating an anthology of poems by African American, Black British, & Caribbean Women & Identifying Writers. Booker currently hosts and curates Peepal Tree Press’s Literary podcast, New Caribbean Voices. A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). Her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75(autumn 2019) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2020). Her poem Libation, published in Poetry Review (winter 2022) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2023).

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. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet was published by Riverrun in 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. Her most recent acting role was in Blue by Derek Jarman, which was directed by Neil Bartlett and featured Russell Tovey, Jay Bernard, and Travis Alabanza. Blue sold out its run across the UK and more dates are expected for the future.

Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit was born in Paris and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage. Her eighth collection of poetry, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and for Wales Book of the Year. Her seventh, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017), won the inaugural Laurel Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Four previous collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.  Pascale was a co-founder of The Poetry School, has been Chair of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Laurel Prize, and led popular poetry workshops at Tate Modern for nine years. Her debut novel, My Hummingbird Father, was published by Salt in 2024. Her ninth collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe in April 2025, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.