Poetry Surgery with Penny Boxall
In-depth 1-2-1 discussion on your poetry with poet and tutor Penny Boxall.
This is a rare opportunity for feedback on your work from celebrated poet and tutor, Penny Boxall, author of the Edwin Morgan Prize-winning Ship of the Line (2014, Valley Press), Who Goes There? (Valley Press, 2018) and, with woodblock artist Naoko Matsubara, In Praise of Hands (Ashmolean Museum, 2020).
Penny will spend 23 Nov resident with the Poetry School, with four 1-hour slots available, for in-depth one-to-one discussion on your poetry; so, book a slot and prepare a selection of poems-in-progress for advice and guidance.
The following slots are available (all times given in GMT):
10.30–11.30am
11.45am–12.45pm
2.30–3.30pm
3.45–4.45pm
Sessions for this course will take place In-Person at Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA. To book your session, click ‘purchase course’ and then select a slot from the drop-down menu. You may submit up to 6 poems of no more than 150 lines total. Poems should be sent to [email protected] no less than 2 weeks before your session.
More information about how our In-Person Courses work can be found on the In-Person Courses page. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
About Penny Boxall 
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Penny Boxall has held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships at Lucy Cavendish College (University of Cambridge) and the University of York. Her collections are Ship of the Line (Edwin Morgan Award winner, 2016), Who Goes There? and In Praise of Hands (with artist Naoko Matsubara, published by the Ashmolean Museum in 2020). She won the 2018 Mslexia/PBS International Women’s Poetry Competition, and has held various fellowships and residencies, including at Merton College (Oxford), Hawthornden Castle, Gladstone’s Library, Cove Park, and Château de Lavigny. In August 2022 she was the UNESCO Cities of Literature Writer-in-Residence in Tartu, Estonia.
She has taught on the MA in Poetry at Oxford Brookes University, adapted medieval texts with local groups for performance, co-written a play for Magdalen College School (Oxford), and guest lectured at the universities of York and York St John.
She enjoys working collaboratively, and is currently working on Replaying the Tape – a word/music/tape performance about chance and evolution – with palaeontologist Frankie Dunn and percussionist Jane Boxall. She also writes fiction for children aged 9-12, and received funding from Arts Council England for the development of her debut middle-grade novel. From June 2023, she is Writer-in-Residence at Wytham Woods, University of Oxford.
‘The Poetry School has helped me to find a way of going deeper into the poem writing process, I have learnt how to read other poets' poems and have gained more knowledge about how to give feedback and receive it. The feedback I was given by the tutor was very useful and helped me become a critic of my own work.’
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