Poetry and Happiness: A Workshop with Katrina Naomi
In this uplifting and intimate session, Katrina Naomi guides us through free-writing exercises, which we’ll develop into poetry on the things we cherish.
You’ll look at ways of turning difficulty around in our poems to add surprise and fresh ideas within often complex emotions.
Katrina will also offer tips on some of the practical sides of writing, how to look after ourselves as poets, how to deal with rejection (we all get rejected!), plus suggestions on how to keep our creativity flowing, even in the bad times.
We’ll read, write and discuss. Bring a notebook and an open mind.
SAT 17 OCT: £30
The workshop is capped at 10 people, so pre-booking is essential. Email catb@hypatia-trust.org.uk to RSVP.
Katrina Naomi’s fourth poetry collection, Battery Rocks, (Seren, 2024) won the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, the Holyer an Gof award for Poetry, and was recommended in The Guardian.
Her previous collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and Saboteur Award, the latter jointly with Helen Mort. She is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize and has twice been highly commended in the Forward Prize.
Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, The Verb, Open Country and Poetry Please, BBC’s Countryfile Podcast, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation.
In September 2025, Katrina published the pamphlet dance as if with Verve, following a collaboration with dancer/choreographer Kyra Norman. Katrina performs her poetry throughout the UK and internationally.
Before poetry, Katrina worked as an activist and commissioning editor for an international human rights organisation. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths, and tutors for Arvon and the Poetry School. Katrina lives in Cornwall.
