Poetry Masterclass with Karen McCarthy Woolf
19 Sep at 11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Sharpen your skills and develop your practice with some of poetry’s leading lights.
Bad Betty masterclasses offers a chance to work closely with one of the featured acts.
LYRIC IN(TER)VENTIONS
This deep dive into disruption as a formal technique offers an opportunity to think about who and what your poetry is in dialogue with and how that plays out on the page. Together we will consider non-linear approaches to longer pieces and sequences, exploring image, juxtaposition and sonic patterning alongside ekphrastic strategies where the poem is in conversation with other art forms.
About the facilitator:
KAREN MCCARTHY WOOLF
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf, FRSL, PhD, is the author of three poetry collections and editor of seven literary anthologies. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and her début, An Aviary of Small Birds was an Observer Book of the Year.
As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, where she wrote her latest collection, Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2026): a ‘taut’ and ‘hypnotic’ (Guardian) poetic meditation on the sacred, the city and our access to nature. In 2025 she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England). She has performed her work everywhere from The Royal Festival Hall, Kings Place and Barbican, to venues across Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Her broadcast credits include a reversioning of Homer’s Book of The Dead for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week; Miss Birdie’s Letter, BBC Radio 3 Between the Ears and a multi-authored reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando shortlisted for a BBC Audio Award.
She has worked on many collaborations, most recently as a librettist on Divine Feminine, a spatially-realised electronic and acoustic choral opera with the British-Iranian composer and turntablist Shiva Feshareki.
Her poems are translated into Croatian, Dutch, Italian, Macedonian, Spanish and Turkish; have been exhibited by Poems on the Underground; produced as animation and dance; and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament in a poetry ‘bombing’ by the Chilean collective Casagrande.
About Bad Betty:
Bad Betty Press is an award-winning independent poetry publisher, and curator of live literature events taking place across the UK. London-born, Nottingham-based, Bad Betty was set up in 2017 with the aim of showcasing risk-taking poetry, supporting poets’ artistic development and celebrating stories less often told.
Bad Betty is a British Book Awards Small Press of the Year Finalist (2024, 2023), a Michael Marks Publishers’ Award winner (2022), and the parent of pamphlet imprint, Little Betty.