Lyra Community Collabs (+ Workshops)
Each year, Lyra commissions a variety of community groups to collaborate with the festival and deliver specific activities, engaging people all over the city. Some of this work is shared at Lyra - Bristol Poetry Festival.
2024 Community Collabs
Our 2024 commissioned groups responded to the theme of Poetic Futures.
Word by Word, an online-first collective, facilitated writing workshops themed around climate anxiety and land, aimed particularly at writers whose identities are marginalised.
Bristol After Stroke ran Zoom poetry workshops for an aphasia group with communication disabilities, facilitated by a speech and language therapist, using group poetry to consider futures and whether AI/technology can help people with aphasia.
Our Future (Braiding Stories & Poetry Together) was a collaborative project bringing together Polish and Somali women in Bristol to explore and share stories, poetry in their own languages and in English, and creating line-by-line poems, working alongside a number of community organisations across Bristol. Led by Agata Palmer.
We Will Read You delivered a project themed around Queer Futures, inviting artists from Bristol and beyond about to respond to queer futures, utopias and (sometimes) dystopias - including navigating race, disability and class. Their cabaret-style event opened Lyra Festival on April 12th 2024.
Bonds Poetry Exhibition was a poetic exploration of the significance of the word ‘Bonds’ in all its contexts in the entwined histories of Bristolians, led by Ralph Hoyte and Martin Rieser. They delivered writing workshops with facilitators including Jenny Mitchell, bringing together communities across the city, as well as both an app-based experience and a visual exhibition at Bristol Beacon during Lyra Festival 2024.