Our next event is on Thursday 4th April 2019, upstairs at the John Harvey Tavern, Bear Yard, Cliffe High St, Lewes BN7 2AN.
Doors open 7pm, readings start 7.45pm.
Tickets £5 (£3 students, and the unwaged and claiming benefit) at the door on the night.
Readers: Kay Syrad (Poetry), John Usher (Prose) and Maria Jastrzębska (Poetry).
Kay Syrad’s recent publications include two volumes of poetry, Inland (Cinnamon Press, 2018) and Double Edge (Pighog, 2012); also prose and poetry in Exchange, a collaborative art-text work with Chris Drury and Cape Farewell (Little Toller, 2015). She also has two novels, The Milliner and the Phrenologist (2009/reprinted 2012) and Send (2015, both Cinnamon Press). Kay is Poetry Editor of the long-standing poetry journal ENVOI, and co-founder of Vert Institute for art events and writing at her home near Lewes. She has recently been collaborating with Clare Whistler on a series of eco-poetics workshops at ONCA Gallery, Brighton and Knepp Wildland in East Sussex.
John Usher has been writing for his own pleasure since retiring a few years ago. He has completed one novel and is well-advanced with his second, which deals with personal themes concerning the state versus populism.
Maria Jastrzębska came to the U.K from Poland as a child. Her most recent collection is The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue (Cinnamon Press/Liquorice Fish 2018). The Cedars of Walpole Park, her selected, was translated into Polish (SŻP 2015). Dementia Diaries toured nationally with Lewes Live Literature (2011). She co-edited Queer in Brighton (2014) and translated Justyna Bargielska’s The Great Plan B (Smokestack 2017), collaborating on Snow Q (2018). Maria’s blog is at https://mariajastrzebska.wordpress.com/
Marek Urbanowicz has been published in a number of magazines, notably Agenda, The Frogmore Papers and its offshoots. Marek recently completed an MA in Voice Studies at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and is currently a member of the RADA Elders Company. He is very interested in the relationship between poetry and how it is voiced. He is a well-known Brighton acupuncturist, having qualified in 1979.
Jeremy Page has edited The Frogmore Papers since 1983. His short stories have been widely published, and he is the author of several collections of poems, including Closing Time (Pindrop Press) and Stepping Back: Resubmission for the Ordinary Level Examination in Psychogeography (Frogmore Press). He has also written plays: Loving Psyche was performed in Bremen in 2010, and Verrall of the White Hart in Lewes in 2014. A novella, London Calling, will be published by Cultured Llama in September (2018).
Robert Seatter
After a childhood spent mainly in Leicestershire, James Flynn studied in Oxford and has worked in ‘Europe’ as well as in London. His poems have appeared in magazines sadly defunct (14, The SHOp and Smiths Knoll) and happily still extant (
Matt Freidson has published more than twenty short stories, including in Best New American Voices, The Needlewriters anthology, Ontario Review, Confrontation, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. He is a former Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and has taught writing at various places, including Birkbeck and City University. Currently he works for 
Alice Owens has recently completed her first novel, working title Latent Grace, set in her native Alabama. It is currently with a potential agent and she is working on her second novel. Alice taught creative writing at the University of Sussex. She was founder and editor of the newsletter, Malawi Update, and co-editor of Human Rights and the Making of Constitutions: Malawi, Kenya, Uganda. Formerly, she was a civil rights lawyer in D.C and a Malawi human rights advocate with NGOs and the UN.
needlewriters.co.uk 