Poetry Masterclass with Sarah Howe

Sharpen your skills and develop your practice with some of poetry’s leading lights.

Bad Betty masterclasses take place in the afternoon prior to each Bad Betty Live show, and offer a chance to work closely with one of the featured acts.

Join Sarah Howe for a masterclass about the stories we inherit: the overheard or uncertain, the incomplete or misunderstood. We’ll look at poems that arise out of the dark and fertile space where generational memory and ancestral lore shade into myth and hearsay. We’ll touch on family secrets, buried shames, the scenes of storytelling, and what happens when a single event is refracted through contrasting perspectives. We’ll look at poems that explore the myths – sometimes deep-seated or destructive – about ourselves imposed on us by others, thinking about inherited forms, and newly invented ones. Poets we’ll read together might include Terrance Hayes, Cathy Linh Che, Richard Siken, and more, en route to generating new drafts of our own.

About the facilitator:

SARAH HOWE

Sarah Howe is a Hong Kong-born British poet and editor. Her first collection of poems, Loop of Jade (2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second collection, Foretokens (2025), is a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.