Robin Vaughan-Williams is a poet, producer, and author of The Manager (Happenstance Press) and How to Fix a Human, an art-and-poetry collaboration for Sampson Low. His poems have appeared in places like Acumen, Anthropocene, Dream Catcher, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Under the Radar, and in collaborations with artists such as Alban Low and Stéphanie Barbetta. Currently based in London, where he established Ealing's New Gen youth festival, he has also lived in Sheffield, where he ran Spoken Word Antics for five years and presented a radio show on SheffieldLive, and Nottingham where he worked for Nottingham Writers' Studio and instigated the first Nottingham Festival of Words. Since 2008 he has been developing a practice in collaborative poetry improvisation, and is currently running improv workshops in London.
Robin has run writing workshops for a range of groups, from young people and students through to people with aphasia, care home residents, and practising writers.
These have included introductory workshops, workshops working towards a performance, a digital poetry jam using an iPad-based sampler for young people with learning disabilities, writing from local and family history, and intergenerational writing. He is especially excited about collaborative working and group devising.
Groups Robin has worked for include: Aphasia Nottingham, Apples & Snakes, Sutton's Imagine Festival of the Arts, Joseph Hood Primary School, Sheffield's Off the Shelf festival, Sheffield Young Writers, and WAC Arts.
Since 2008 Robin has been pioneering a practice in collaborative poetry improvisation. He developed an improvised poetry performance with a group of emerging poets for Apples and Snakes in 2015 ('Grey Parrot Singing'), has collaborated with Quick Shifts dance improvisation collective in Leicester and Sheffield's jazz improvisors Charlie Collins and Derek Saw, and ran a poetry improv group in Nottingham with Mark Goodwin and Rich Goodson.
Poetry improv is suitable for group sizes from 4 to 12, and focuses on building trust in the voice, opening up to others, and discovering participants' creative spontaneity.
Some recordings of poetry improvisations can be found on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/robinrvw/sets/poetry-improv-favourites