Vanessa Kisuule on the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective

For the second year running, The Poetry School have invited this year’s New Poets Collective to run a series of exciting courses with us. We’ve been chatting to Vanessa Kisuule, poet, performer, and lead tutor for the Collective, about the exciting scheme and what she looks for in applications. Read Vanessa’s thoughts below and check out the full programme of workshops here.

1. How has your own experience as a poet influenced your approach to mentoring emerging writers?

Coming from a performance background, I place a lot of emphasis on the oral tradition and how we can find playful, iterative ways to approach live poetry. I’m less interested in how we might deliver our work in a rehearsed, pre-emptive way and how we can cultivate attention and responsiveness to any given moment, room or audience. It’s a lot of fun to teach with these principles in mind.

2. The Southbank New Poets Collective welcomes poets from underrepresented backgrounds. Why do you think this kind of approach is vital in poetry today?

As it is in poetry, so it is in any collective endeavour: we gain a much fuller and richer understanding of the world if we involve people of all walks of life into the room. To me, it’s not about quotas or being seen to be doing the right thing. It’s important that we frame the way we speak about ‘underrepresented people’ properly so we don’t perpetuate otherness or an assumed ‘default position’. People don’t underrepresent themselves. They are implicitly and explicitly overlooked, shut out or tokenised, or the myriad ways they create their own creative opportunities and spaces are not considered legitimate. I don’t believe in people being ‘voiceless’. Almost always, people speak but are not listened to. To that end, I believe there is clear mutual gain for everyone when the cross-section of people in the room offers a multitude of life experiences. It’s a no brainer!

3. What do you look for in applicants? Is there a particular quality or potential that stands out?

We like people who are earnest and keen. The collective experience lives or dies by the willingness of its participants to get stuck in and invest in the year. There are all kinds of personalities, poetic approaches and levels of experience in each cohort, but what we’ve learnt to screen for at this stage is clear enthusiasm. We want people that will prioritise coming every month and are just as excited to meet and make friends as they are writing new work. We’re less preoccupied with shiny publishing credentials or professional aspirations: Will and I consider the collective to be somewhat a respite from the careerist, ladder climbing impulse that infects most of us writers. NPC is first and foremost a space to be explorative, playful and approach poetry from some less obvious angles – we want people that are up for trying new things and aren’t precious about ‘failure’. When we’re selecting poets, we of course want to see something in the poetry that delights and intrigues in some way. But we’re not looking for perfection, if such a thing even exists. This is a development opportunity, so we want to see plenty of promise but also space for a poet to grow. 

4. The workshops in our Easter Programme are led by poets from the New Poets Collective – what makes learning from these emerging voices such an exciting opportunity?

Will and I were so thrilled by the programme when we read the copy for each workshop. What shone through was the distinct approach each has to poetry and how much they trust they each have in their natural inclinations and personalities to guide the way they facilitate. I have no doubt that each workshop will offer a lateral way into poetry that goes beyond the typical workshop format. The workshops on offer are every bit as fun, wacky, smart and provocative as we know these brilliant poets to be! We can vouch for each poet’s devotion to poetry and we trust that any participant will come away with poems (or at least ideas for poems) they might never have arrived at on their own. 


Our New Poets Collective workshops start next week (April 2025). Have a look at the exciting selection of topics and tutors here.

Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won over ten slam titles, including The Roundhouse Poetry Slam, Hammer & Tongue National Slam and the Nuyorican Poetry Slam. She has been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Blue Peter, Don’t Flop and TEDxVienna. Kisuule has performed around the world, including at an array of festivals, and was Glastonbury Festival’s resident poet in 2019. Her poem ‘Hollow’ on the historic toppling of Edward Colston’s statue was viewed more than 750,000 times in the aftermath of BLM protests in 2020. Her two poetry collections are published by Burning Eye Books, and her work was highly commended in The Forward Book of Poetry 2019. She has written for publications including The Guardian, NME and Lonely Planet and was the Bristol City Poet, 2018 – 2020. She is currently working on an essay collection and her debut novel.