clare e. potter - Portobello Poetry Walk

clare e. potter Author

clare e. potter is a writer and performer from a South Wales mining village. She lived for ten years in the Deep South where she studied an MA in Afro-Caribbean literature and taught in a progressive school in New Orleans. She won the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, and the Jim Criddle prize for celebrating the Welsh language in Literature. Her first poetry collection spilling histories (2006) will shortly be followed by a subsequent collection, A Certain Darkness, for which she was awarded a Literature Wales writing bursary. clare conceived of and directed the BBC It's My Shout documentary The Wall and the Mirror.

In 2016 she received Arts Council Wales funding for a poetry and jazz collaboration to respond to the trauma of Hurricane Katrina. She has written for the Welsh National Opera in community theatre and singing projects, and has received various commissions to write poetry in collaboration with artists: a poem for the new Keir Hardie Health Park, street poetry in the pavements of Pontypridd, and washing lines in Tredegar. for example. clare was poet-in-residence for the Landmark Trust during the two year restoration of medieval house, Llwyn Celyn; was poet-in-residence at Moravian Academy in Pennsylvania, and for the Wales Arts Review for a month.

clare has translated the work of the National Poet of Wales, was a Hay Festival Writer at Work for two years, and has performed at the Smithsonian Folk-Life Festival in the USA. She is currently working on a new poetry collection about craftspeople thanks to another Literature Wales bursary.  clare has been widely published in magazines, anthologies and literary journals in the UK and USA and has acted in two films. Her biggest passion is working in schools and on community projects with other artists.