Fourteenpoems is back with another exciting range of poets who will be sharing their work and writing process over four evenings in November.
** NOTE THAT YOU'LL NEED TO REGISTER TO EACH EVENT THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO ATTEND **
Dates: Wednesdays
July 9 – 6.30-8.30 PM: Jennifer Wong - Write wherever your heart is…
July 16 – 6.30-8.30 PM: Hetty Cliss - Sonnet Enchantment
July 23 – 6.30-8.30 PM: William Rayfet Hunter - Between the Lines: Poetry and Prose in Dialogue
July 30 – 6.30-8.30 PM: Chad Bennete - On Queer Forms
Jennifer Wong is a published author of several collections such as Letters Home, Time Difference and Diary of a Miu Miu Salegirl. She is also a co-editor of Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. Her work appears in 14 poems, Bi+ Lines, and Candlestick Press. Her next collection, Light Year, is in progress.
About the workshop
A generative poetry workshop that welcomes the tangled, the unfinished and the unspeakable. Together, we’ll explore how poetry can hold emotional contradictions: moments where clarity falters and complexity takes centre stage.
Through a blend of writing prompts, shared readings and other inspiration including poems by Richard Siken, Caroline Bird, alongside songs, photographs, and found materials, participants will be guided to write from the heart of their mixed feelings and incomplete thoughts.
Hetty Cliss is a poet and spoken word artist from the Cambridgeshire Fens. Her debut pamphlet (In)Habit is out with fourteen poems. More of her work can be found in Seaford Review, Propel Magazine and Bi+Lines An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. She was also the 2024 Ware Sonnet Prize winner.
About the workshop
Harnessing the magic of the sonnet form as a vehicle to generate new writing and as a container to give poetic ideas shape.
Inspired by poet Jacqueline Saphra’s idea of the sonnet as “a gift: free, beautiful and limitless in possibility,” this workshop invites participants to explore the enduring power of poetic form. Guided by Hetty, we’ll delve into the sonnet’s structure as a catalyst for creativity.
Drawing on the works of Richard Scott, Marilyn Hacker, Diane Seuss, and Terrance Hayes, we’ll uncover the vitality of the contemporary sonnet and experiment with writing our own sonnet, or sonnet-esque poems.
Instagram: @hetstagram | Bluesky: @hettycliss.bsky.social | Website: www.hettycliss.co.uk
William Rayfet Hunter is an author, poet, essayist, and multidisciplinary facilitator whose work dwells in the abject, delicate, and messy parts of being alive. Their debut novel, Sunstruck, won the #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize and has been shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2025. Their poetry was featured in Issue 15 of 14poems. Their writing interrogates the binaries of prose and poetry, finding a third space for hybrid story-telling that is both bodily and divine.
About the workshop
“Between the Lines: Poetry and Prose in Dialogue” explores the rich overlaps between lyric and narrative, story and image.
Guided by the genre-blurring work from writers such as Natalie Diaz, Caleb Azumah Nelson and Jay Bernard, this generative workshop invites participants to read, write and reflect on hybrid forms. We’ll explore how storytelling can exist in fragments, how prose turns poeti, and how poetry holds narrative complexity.
Chad Bennett is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. His poetry has appeared in journals including Denver Quarterly, Fence, fourteen poems, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Offing, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and The Volta.
His first book of poems, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era (Sarabande Books, 2020), was chosen by Ocean Vuong for the 2018 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. He is also the author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), a critical study of the queer poetics of gossip.
About the workshop
What queers a poem?
In this workshop, we’ll explore how poetic form can both reflect and reshape queer experience. Together, we’ll look at traditional forms that have been queered, alongside those invented to express the nuances of queer life. Through discussion, reading and writing, participants will experiment with inhabiting existing structures or crafting entirely new ones—using poetry to give form to the fluid, the fleeting and the in-between.