Summit: A Poetry School Festival is an ecopoetry, nature, and climate writing festival, with its inaugural edition being a collaboration between Poetry School, University of Leeds Poetry Centre, the Laurel Prize, the National Poetry Centre, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and National Landscapes Association. Summit’s ethos is centred around poetry, community, and action.

The festival brings together some of the UK’s most celebrated writers and ecological thinkers for two days of performances, workshops, surgeries, and panel discussions. Summit takes place on 19 October at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and 20 October at the University of Leeds Poetry Centre.

Our Summit Festival Poet-in-Residence will spend time absorbing the atmosphere of the Festival, attending, in-person, the workshops, panel discussions, and reading events, and reflecting on the urgency of the Festival’s themes and ethos. They will write a new poem for Poetry School to publish, using any aspect of the experience that has been of inspiration, alongside a reflective blog.

Key Benefits and Remuneration
• Two nights’ accommodation in Leeds on Friday 18 October and Saturday 19 October.
• Travel from home to Leeds and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
• A free pass to attend workshops at Yorkshire Sculpture Park on Saturday 19 October.
• An invitation to the Laurel Prize-giving Ceremony and Dinner on Saturday evening.
• A free pass to attend workshops and panel discussions in Leeds on Sunday 20 October.
• Payment of £250 to create 40–80 lines of poetry, responding to the Festival’s experiences, themes, values, and ethos, together with a reflective blog.
• A place on our Autumn Term Online Fortnightly Feedback course with Natalie Whittaker (worth £95); n.b. one of the draft poems submitted for feedback on this course should be the commissioned Summit Festival poem-in-progress.

Find out more here

Deadline for applications: Tuesday 1 October, 11.59pm