The Poetry Business: Digital Residencies

Based in Sheffield The Poetry Business is a publisher and writer development agency with a strong reputation for discovering, developing and publishing outstanding new poets. They publish books and pamphlets as Smith | Doorstop, publish The North magazine and hold writing days and workshops. We’ve been partners since the Squad started and recently have worked together on a series of digital residencies.

In our first round, a Squad poet took up residence on The Poetry Business website, producing blog posts, audio clips, writing prompts and more. It was up to them to decide what shape the content of their residency took. That freedom of choice continued in our second round, this time pairs of Squad poets had two months to bounce off each other and come up with joint or individual contributions, which you can explore here, or find out more about the poets who took part from the links below.

The first Poet In Residence, hosted throughout February, was Helen Bowell.

March ’21: Lenni Sanders

April ’21: Lydia Allison.

May ’21: Ila Colley

June ’21: Hannah Hodgson

August: Jessica Wood

September ’21: Nasim Asl

October ’21: Ruth Yates

November ’21: Prerana Kumar

January ’22: Jasmine Gray

February ’22: Elizabeth Gibson

February March ’23: Celestine Stilwell & Ruth Awolola