Inspire Poetry Festival 2025 - Bad Ideas Club: Poetry Showcase at Mansfield Central Library

Join us to celebrate the work created at Bad Ideas Club - a workshop series conducted over nine weeks in three Nottinghamshire libraries.  

For a chance to share your own your own poems on the open mic, please email reading@inspireculture.org.uk  in advance. Priority will be given to workshop participants.

Chris Lanyon is a poet and mathematician. He has nearly a decade of experience running poetry workshops for people at all stages of their writing practice.

Leanne Moden is a poet, theatre maker and educator, based in Nottingham (UK). She’s performed across the UK and Europe, including gigs at WOMAD Festival, Sofar Sounds, and Bestival on the Isle of Wight. She was a semi-finalist at the BBC Edinburgh Fringe Slam in 2018, and has shown work at Fourth Wave Feminist Festival, Trinity College Cambridge, and TEDxWOMEN UCL. In Summer 2019, Leanne performed her first solo theatre show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and her second pamphlet of poetry Get Over Yourself was published with Burning Eye Books in 2020. She is currently working on her first full-length play.

Jake Wild Hall is an award-winning poet and one half of Bad Betty Press. He has performed on BBC Radio and at festivals and literary events across the UK. He is a multiple slam champion and his work has been published in magazines, anthologies and online journals. He is the author of two pamphlets Solomon’s World which was longlisted for the Saboteur Awards Best Pamphlet, and Blank. He has worked with partners including Penguin, Apples and Snakes, Writing East Midlands, Derby Poetry Festival and Pearsons. He has also been a guest tutor for Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham University, King’s College London, Lincoln University and others. 

His debut collection Alanis Morissette is due out in 2026 with Broken Sleep Books.  

Bad Betty is an award-winning independent publisher of new poetry, and curator of live literature events taking place across the UK. 

London-born, Nottingham-based, Bad Betty Press was set up in 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall with the aim of showcasing exciting and risk-taking poetry, supporting poets’ artistic development and celebrating stories less often told.  

Bad Betty won the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award in 2022, and was a regional finalist for the British Book Awards Small Press of the Year in 2023, 2024 and 2025. 

Their books have won or been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Michael Marks Award, the Laurel Prize, Polari First Book Prize and BAMB Readers’ Award, featured in the Guardian‘s Best Recent Poetry, and selected as a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and several times as Pamphlet Choice.

Find out more about the project and the other events in the series by clicking the link: Writing Workshop: Bad Ideas Club

Return to the Inspire Poetry Festival 2025 home page.