The Workshop Handbook for Writers

Award-winning poet, journalist, teacher and lecturer, Jackie Wills shares her experience of more than 20 years running workshops, and offers her personal insight into what works and why. In different settings – business, working in the community and schools – she outlines the pitfalls and risks in a wide-ranging handbook that no writing workshop leader should be without.

Jackie Wills has worked for newspapers, magazines and several universities. A former journalist, she's been a writer in residence in business, schools, arts and community organisations, including Unilever, London Underground, Shoreham Airport, the Surrey Hills, the London Symphony Orchestra and Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and run reading groups.

Over three decades, Wills has organised live poetry events and mentored many emerging writers, consolidating her experience in The Workshop Handbook for Writers (Arc, 2016). Her poems feature in several anthologies including Writing Motherhood (Seren, 2017) and Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry (Forward Arts Foundation, 2015). Wills writes short stories and creative non-fiction as well as poetry. She has collaborated over many years with visual artist Jane Fordham and Fabrica Gallery in Brighton.