Out-Spoken Academy with Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Jack Underwood & Anthony Anaxagorou
Duration: 6 weeks
Dates: 6 May – 14 June 2024
Applications are OPEN until midnight UK Sunday 21 April 2024.
Over six weeks, participants will receive 36 hours of active teaching and weekly individual tutorial sessions from our award winning tutors. Each week will comprise:
three two-hour tutor-led workshops from 7–9pm UK (Monday, Wednesday and Friday); and
a scheduled half hour individual tutorial on a Tuesday or Thursday.
The programme is designed around a weekly tutor rotation. You will receive two weeks of teaching and tutorials from each tutor.
Workshops and tutorials will be delivered via Zoom and you will have access to a dedicated classroom space on Padlet, where you will be able to access course materials and ask any questions.
We believe in the importance of peer community and feedback. You will have access to a Padlet board where you can share poems, feedback and discussion with the other members of your cohort, and will have the opportunity to join a WhatsApp group of students.
Workshops are recorded and the recordings will be made available to you, password-protected on our Vimeo, the day after each session. At the end of the course you will receive a handout collating all the course materials, as well as links to the session recordings, to revisit in future.
Course delivery is wholly online. We welcome applications from students anywhere in the world, but applicants should note that all teaching is provided in evenings UK time.
Course fee: £1500. We are pleased to offer two fully-funded bursary places for low-income writers.
This course is selective and strictly limited to twenty places. Apply here:
What will I learn?
Renowned practising poets with many years of experience in teaching and mentoring, our tutors tell you a little about what you can expect from the Academy course:
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
“I’m really happy to join this year’s season as a tutor. Out-Spoken are leading the way as a platform for anybody who is interested in poetry to throw themselves at it fully and be supported wholeheartedly in the process.”
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer, and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber in the UK and in North America by Alfred A. Knopf.
Jack Underwood
“An intensive, six-week online course of this kind offers the chance to deepen and expand your poetic practice, or to completely overhaul your approach, in a guided and supportive environment. I love teaching poets to write towards themselves, to locate their particular poetic sensibility and language, and I'm excited to meet the participants, and see what they unlock and discover.”
Jack Underwood is an award-winning poet, writer and critic. First published as part of the Faber New Poets series in 2009, he is the author of two collections of poetry, Happiness (Faber, 2015) and A Year in the New Life (Faber, 2021) and his debut book of non-fiction, Not Even This, was published in 2021 by Corsair. He is senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College.
Anthony Anaxagorou
“We’ll be looking at the ways poems offer themselves up to complexity; how they want to destabilise reality and logic, spinning the ordinary into the strange while pushing into more unexplored terrain. Rather than focusing on the event, we’ll look at how we can build up a poetic register which is able to speak and capture the emotional condition of the event rather than rely solely on its drama. We’ll consider what we do with poems once we’ve got our initial drafts down. How do we move them into the next stage? What do we look for? How do we know when we’re over-editing the poem or tampering too much with its intention? These are all highly common and legitimate concerns poets have about their work, so together we’ll explore how we can refine, chisel and shape our words into fully formed poems.”
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. He has published three volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories along with a craft book entitled How To Write It. His latest poetry collection, Heritage Aesthetics (Granta, 2022), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023. He is the founder and artistic director of Out-Spoken Live, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre. He’s also the publisher at Out-Spoken Press and founder of Propel Magazine.
“The Out-Spoken Academy is one I wish existed a decade ago, when I was still trying to find my way in and out of a poem. It’s a delight to be able to offer this second term where again the range of experience across the three tutors will strengthen any poet’s arsenal, enhance their writing practice and push them beyond their limits. ”
Pricing & Bursary Places
The course fee is £1500, payable in full prior to the course start date. Details of our payment and cancellation policy can be found in our Terms & Conditions.
We are pleased to be able to offer two bursary places, with fees fully covered, to low income writers. If you cannot afford the course fees and would like to be considered for a bursary place, please complete the application ‘Out-Spoken Academy (Application for a Bursary Place)’ on our Submittable.
No evidence of financial circumstances is required.
How to Apply & Application Timeline
Apply now via our Submittable portal, with a poem sample and short cover letter. Applications are open until midnight UK Sunday 21 April 2024.
Our tutors will review all applications, and applicants (including those for bursary places) will be notified during the w/c 29 April 2024. Payment of applicable course fees should be made in full by 5 May 2024.
“The Academy was extremely helpful to me in order to grow as a writer. Each one of us entered with different goals and expectations but the intensity of exercises and diversity of the topics offered by the tutors covered most aspects in an excellent way. The one-to-one sessions were brilliant. Most of all, there was a general feeling that the tutors weren’t just there to share their knowledge and expertise but have us succeed moving onto the next step of our path as writers.”
FAQs
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The Academy course is intended to be an intensive experience, where sustained focus over its six weeks will help you develop your practice.
Students are expected to have some experience writing their own poetry to get the most out of the course, but no publication record or prior formal study of poetry is required.
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The Spring Term will run from Monday 6 May to Friday 14 June 2024 (inclusive).
Applications are open via our Submittable portal until midnight UK SUNDAY 21 APRIL 2024.
Our tutors will review all applications, and applicants (including those for bursary places) will be notified during the w/c 29 April 2024.
Payment of applicable course fees should be made in full by 5 May 2024.
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Yes. We welcome applications from poets anywhere in the world, provided that they note that the course is focused on English language poetry and that all teaching is scheduled on weekday evenings (UK) time.
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The course is designed so that tutors rotate weekly, ie. Week 1 (Tutor A), Week 2 (Tutor B), Week 3 (Tutor C), Week 4 (Tutor A), Week 5 (Tutor B), and Week 6 (Tutor C).
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Yes. In addition to the two taught group workshops, you will have the opportunity for a half-hour individual tutorial each week.
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If your application is successful, payment of the full course fee of £1500 is required by 1 May 2024.
Payment should be made by bank transfer and you are responsible for any currency conversion or other transaction fees.
The above does not apply to fully-funded bursary places.
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We are unable to offer instalment payment at the current time.
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Yes, we are pleased to be able to offer two fully-funded bursary places for low-income writers on each of our Academy courses. If you would like to be considered for a bursary place, please apply through the ‘Application for a Bursary Place’ option on our Submittable portal.
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No, we cannot consider applications for two categories. The bursary places are intended for low-income writers who would not otherwise be able to afford to attend the course.
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No. Our Academy courses are designed by the tutors to form an integrated whole. We are unable to offer attendance to part of the courses. If you are interested in shorter form teaching, Out-Spoken does offer in-person masterclasses, and one-off online workshops.
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Recordings of workshop sessions will be made available to students after each session, so you will be able to watch-back any sessions you miss. If you are unable to attend an individual tutorial scheduled with a tutor we request that you contact that tutor to inform them as soon as you are able. Reasonable efforts will be made to reschedule missed tutorials but we cannot guarantee this.
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Yes, each group workshop will be recorded and the video made available to participants the next day via our password-protected Vimeo.
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You can read our full Terms & Conditions here: www.outspokenldn.com/academy-tcs
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If you’ve read these FAQ and our Terms & Conditions, and you have a query that’s not addressed, do please email Patricia Ferguson on academy@outspokenldn.com and she’ll be happy to help.