Hear from leading Derby poets, Esme Sears, Aoife O’Connor, Sophie Sparham and Dan Webber in this free event that responds to our festival’s theme of Art as Activism.
Presented in partnership with Derby Poetry Festival, Speakers’ Corner is a time to reflect, inspire, and connect with other festival attendees.
Poets
Aoife O’Connor
Esme Sears
Sophie Sparham
Dan Webber
Featured Poets
Poets
Aoife O’Connor (she/they)
Aoife is a Poet and Producer based in Derby. Starting in Slam and Performance Poetry, they have gone on to Graduate from the University of Derby with a Degree in Creative and Professional Writing, and a Master’s in Cultural Events Management from DMU. They are the founder of She Speaks, an intersectional performance night which tackles the lack of diverse spaces. Aoife has been a Trustee of Forward Arts Foundation since 2021 and was a 2020-22 Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries Recipient where she worked as an Assistant Producer for In Good Company for several years. They are a co-director of Derby Poetry Festival and they won the 2023 Aurora Prize for Poetry.
Aoife has continued to work and advocate for Artists, and is passionate about Artist Development, as well as facilitating, and producing live performance events.
Esme Sears
Esme Sears is a creative of Caribbean heritage who was born and grew up in the East Midlands. Esme studied Dentistry before training as an actress and works in healthcare alongside her creative career.
Esme has worked as an actress in regional theatres across the country, including Derby Theatre. Her work has consisted of plays, musicals and children’s theatre. She also narrates audiobooks for RNIB Talking books as well as commercially and is continuing to find her voice directing and creating work as a multidisciplinary artist using poetry, music, movement and film to tell her stories.
Sophie Sparham (they/them)
Sophie Sparham is a poet and writer from Derby. They have written commissions for BBC Radio 4, The V&A and The People’s History Museum. They co-host the night Word Wise which won best spoken word night at the 2019 Saboteur Awards. Their latest collection ‘The Man Who Ate 50,000 Weetabix’ came out in April 2021 via Verve Poetry Press. Sophie’s work has been published in Orbis, Under the Radar and The Morning Star. Their poem Sunrise Over Aldi won third place in the 2020 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition.
Dan Webber (he/him)
Dan Webber (he/him) is an award-winning LGBTQ+ poet, promoter and producer based in Derby.
He has appeared at numerous festivals across the country including Glastonbury Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Wrestival, Timber Festival, Reading Fringe Festival, Y NOT Festival and Wolverhampton Literature Festival. He performed as part of the 25th Birthday Celebrations for Leicester Comedy Festival and was named BBC Local Poet for Derby, for National Poetry Day in 2016.
Commissions include ‘The Derby Witness’ a poetry and street art project for Derby Feste, ‘Whispers From The Woods’, a poetry and nature trail produced with Arts Melbourne for The National Forest, ‘15st 9lbs at time of writing’ for SHOUT Festival, Birmingham, ‘Genre Fluid: Quarantine Edition’ for Coventry Pride (with Fancy Entertainment), ‘322 Ways of Escape’ for the 30th anniversary celebrations for The Brewhouse Arts Centre, Burton-upon-Trent, and ‘Boys’ a queer reimaging of ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ as part of 1623 Theatre’s Queer Folio Project.