As part of our ‘Apart Together’ digital project for 2021, The Poetry Business has partnered up with The Writing Squad to host a digital residency with a Squad poet each month. Each poet will be producing and posting digital content for The Poetry Business, such as blog posts, audio recordings, writing prompts and more.
Ruth Yates is our Digital Poet-In-Residence for October.
Ruth is a poet based in Sheffield. She has a background in speech and language therapy and is interested in all the different ways we communicate.
She was a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award on four occasions, and is an alumnae of the Writing Squad. Her work has been published in magazines and anthologies, including Route 57, The North, Mslexia Writing Squad booklet and Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets, and online, for example in the Writing Squad Staying at Home project.
She recently took part in a collaboration with creative technologist Chris Ball as part of Manchester Festival of Libraries, producing a poem in celebration of librarians and collecting ideas from the public about the future of libraries. You can find her on Instagram at: @ruthey_writes.
For her residency, Ruth will be interviewing Jonathan Davidson about his collection A Commonplace, and writing posts about autistic writers and creativity, among other things.