‘You Are Not Alone’ is a National Poetry Day 2024 Recommendation

National Poetry Day 2024 is on Thursday 3rd October. To help everyone get ready, the organisers have curated three brilliant lists of new and exciting poetry books for their National Poetry Day Recommendations - one each for Children (0-8), Young Readers (8-14) and adult Book Groups. I'm delighted that my book You Are Not Alone has been …

Empathy Lab creates ‘Don’t Hate, Educate’ resources in response to UK riots

"Right now the need for connection, understanding and standing up against hate has never felt more urgent," says Empathy Lab as it launches a set of free resources to help teachers, parents and other educators to grow an empathy-educated generation. You'll find the resources at http://www.empathylab.uk/don-t-hate---educate At the heart of the campaign is the charity's …

Poetry films & empathy: a guest blog for the Children’s Poetry Summit

In an earlier blog for the Children's Poetry Summit I wrote about Making Poetry Films which sparked quite a bit of interest so I thought I’d look at poetry film-making again, this time from a slightly different angle. My poetry collection You Are Not Alone (Troika, 2023), on teen and young adult mental health and wellbeing, has …

‘Let’s Talk About Depression’: a new resource guide for using poetry to explore mental health & wellbeing

My new poetry collection for teens and young adults, You Are Not Alone, is all about mental health and wellbeing. I'm creating a series of resources / guides to accompany the book, offering ideas and suggestions for using the poems in therapeutic, school, community or family settings to help explore different aspects of mental health …

‘Let’s Talk About Anxiety’: a new resource guide for using poetry to explore mental health & wellbeing

Poetry can be a great resource for exploring our thoughts and feelings, providing a ‘way in’ to help us connect with different parts of ourselves and communicate with others, particularly when it comes to challenging conversations. Sometimes it can be helpful to explore a topic from a ‘safe distance’ using scenarios or characters in a …

New book ‘You Are Not Alone’ launches this week, during Children’s Mental Health Week

My new collection of poems for young people is launching this week, just in time for Children’s Mental Health Week 2023 (6-12 February). The book, called You Are Not Alone, is aimed at teen and young adult readers and it’s all about young people’s mental health and emotional wellbeing. The 70+ poems in this collection …