Poetry at Your Place feat. Fay Roberts

Come join us at New Zealand's only regular online poetry event this Sunday for our much loved open mic, with poets performing from all over the world, and feature session! This time with a 20 minute set from UK published poet, performer, producer and voice actor: Fay Roberts!

Note: You can also watch on Facebook Live, but won’t be able to interact as much.

Also note: Your Place is an intentional safe, accessible space where hate speech and offensive language and images will not be tolerated - and will be immediately met with a ban from our moderators.

For those unfamiliar with Fay's work, zir bio reads exactly like this:

Born in 1975, Fay is a classically trained singer from Cardiff who has been getting on stages since the early eighties. Ze was bitten by the performance poetry bug in 2006 in Milton Keynes, after a favour to a friend turned into a place in the final of a poetry slam, and now describes zirself as a “peripatetic, percussive, performance poet with a penchant for project management.”

Ze helped to run Poetry Kapow! in Milton Keynes from 2007 to 2011 and has been involved with the Cambridge chapter of Hammer & Tongue since 2010. Ze set up Cambridge arts label Allographic in 2011, a live events platform and small press. Ze has been the Artistic Director for Spoken Word at The Free Fringe in Edinburgh since 2013 (mostly collaboratively), and host of critically acclaimed Fringe show Other Voices Spoken Word Cabaret since 2012. In 2014, ze ‘won’ the Edinburgh Fringe Anti-Slam as Melody Starchild. In 2017, zir first solo show, The Selkie, was shortlisted as best spoken word show of 2016–17 for the Saboteur Awards. Ze was Glastonbury Festival Poetry&Words Stage’s official blogger in 2019. Ze has been delivering poetry workshops and courses since 2014, and in 2017 ze accidentally became a voice actor, which sometimes feels like a dream come true.

Ze still sings – persistently, and occasionally still bangs a drum with more than metaphorical fervour. Zir work has been described as ‘lyrical’, ‘engaging’, ‘scarily good’, and as ‘musical’, ‘mellifluous’, and ‘mesmerising’.

Fay has performed in pubs, clubs, theatres, tents, malls, ships, museums, art galleries, stone circles, squats, haunted houses, and stately gardens; in open mic, slams, showcases, features, support, English, Welsh, French, BSL, accompaniment, collaboration, competition, and costume across the UK (and worldwide, thanks to Zoom!).

Zir first full collection, Spectral, came out with Burning Eye in March 2022, and ze describes it as “a kind of poetry concept album, with illustrations…”

As always, this event at Your Place is pay-what-you-can-afford, because finances should not be a barrier to art. HOWEVER, if people do not honour that trust-system then this event becomes unsustainable and cannot continue so if you can afford it, please do – the money goes towards paying our artists and keeping this whole thing up and running

And if you cannot afford anything, still come along and enjoy the poetry with my blessing (though do please help us out by sharing the event and getting some other folks along – that’d be amazing!) – we believe in human kindness at Your Place, so hopefully, someone who can afford it will pay a bit more and cover you.

Love x