MA in Writing Poetry Alumni Profiles

Meet our MA in Writing Poetry Graduates, hear their stories and check out their achievements.

Applications for the MA in Writing Poetry are currently open. Please visit the accrediting university, Newcastle’s admissions page for details here.

Steph Morris MA, Class of 2017

When did you start writing poetry?
I first began writing poetry in the 2010s after a creative and emotional hiatus, seeking a new artform and new ways to articulate new experiences, perhaps more personally and on a different scale.

What inspires your poetry?
I write a lot about plants, my passion, and I respond to things going on in my life and the world around me, so it’s personal and political too. I take inspiration from other poets such as Kim Moore, Edwin Morgan or James Schuyler, but also from visual art and music, and my garden.

Have you had any publication successes that you would like to share with us?
I published a chapbook in 2020, Please don’t trample us; we are trying to grow! from Fair Acre Press. I did publish a collection of translated poems, by Austrian modernist Ilse Aichinger, and have had poems in magazines regularly, such as Under the Radar and The North.

What else have you been up to since you graduated?
I was longlisted for the National Poetry Prize and won the Live Canon Borough prize. I’ve been in a few anthologies too; recent highlights included Joy//Us from Arachne Press and Becoming from the Poetry Prescription series edited by Deb Alma. I was also a Royal Literary Fund fellow 2022-24 at Greenwich University which was an enriching experience, coaching students on their writing skills. I received a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England in 2021 to work on visual poetry, a ‘step change’ which would allow me to mix my visual art practice with my literary practice. I began making concrete/ visual poetry leading to an exhibition in 2023. I’ve also done some teaching myself since graduating, including a workshop for Poetry in Aldeburgh, where I also read.

How did studying on the MA in Writing Poetry affect your life?
The MA started me off on a lifetime’s journey of studying poetry, always reading more new poetry and poetry that is new to me, to see what I can learn from it, in the wider sense as well as technically, how it broadens my emotional life as well as teaching me approaches to writing.

Is there a particular moment on the course that affected your writing?
A class with the late, much-missed Roddy Lumsden on expanded ideas of what the sonnet could be, experimental, visual, sonnets in the loosest sense, led me eventually to produce my ‘visual pantoums’, some of which can be seen online in Mercurius Magazine. Roddy saw the Poetry School as having an ‘art-school ethos’ I didn’t need telling twice. I also learned about Pantoums on the MA.

Sarah Gibbons MA, Class of 2023

What have you been up to since you graduated?
I won the 2024 Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize for I Go to the Devil. I’ve been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition,  the Bridport Prize and the Rialto Poetry Competition, I’ve had work published in Mslexia, Under the Radar, And Other Poems and many other places.
With Lauren Thomas, (a fellow MA graduate) I started a poetry magazine called Black Iris , which publishes poetry and essays, and is going really well – we’re currently editing issue number four!

What inspires your poetry?
I try to write about things that tell me something about what it means to be human, and say something about the world we’re in now. The subjects of my work are pretty wide-ranging, from historical figures like Isobel Gowdie, to sex and family, political issues that make me angry, and currently, anything to do with sport.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve written a play based on my final portfolio from the MA and I’m currently working on a collection of poems about sport, from great or notorious sporting individuals to iconic sporting moments, to the role of sport and wellbeing cults in our lives. I strongly believe there needs to be more poetry about darts and cycling!

What impact has studying on the MA in Writing Poetry had on you?
Profoundly. It made me a much better poet, but it also made me a happier person. I made deep, lifelong friendships and I learned more about who I was and what kind of poet I needed to be to be happy.

Tell us about a significant moment on the course.
So many! All probably variants of me taking a poem I was struggling with to course tutor Glyn Maxwell, and him pointing to something on the page and saying: “It will be fine. You just need to do more of THIS.”

Kevin Scully MA, Class of 2024

Why and when did you start writing poetry?
As a child. I think my first poem was published (with payment) at the age of eight or nine! It’s been with me on and off ever since – like some medical conditions!

What sort of subjects do you like to write about?
God, sex and death, the holy trinity.

What have you been up to since you graduated?
I have picked up prizes in several poetry competitions, and had poems published in print and online journals and magazines. I have spent a long time working on Stations of the Cross (a Christian religious practice) and recently submitted this to publishers.

What is your main memory of the MA in Writing Poetry?
The camaraderie that flowed during sessions together. A real sense of common purpose, while respecting each person’s singular track.

Was there a particular moment in a workshop that affected your writing?
There was a ‘darling’, a favoured line which sank under the critique in the workshop. Deleting it improved the poem and it went on to publication.

How did studying on the MA in Writing Poetry affect your life and your poetry?
It reinvigorated me both in practice and personally. It was two of the happiest years of my life.