Deb Alma: Poetry on Prescription: Creative Writing & Wellbeing

Disability History Month / Deb Alma: Poetry on Prescription: Creative Writing & Wellbeing

How vital is creativity to our mental health and wellbeing? What have you turned to during the pandemic to escape the news? Have you discovered a newfound love of poetry? Started a diary, a memoir, a novel?

The University of Wolverhampton's Creative and Professional Writing department will end their autumn semester by asking these questions in a roundtable discussion with renown poet and editor, Deborah Alma. Now owner of the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishops Castle, Deb will be talking about how she became the nation's Emergency Poet, mixing the theatrical with the therapeutic, and why she believes creativity can be so valuable to wellbeing.

Deborah Alma is a UK poet, editor and teacher. She has worked using poetry with people with dementia, in hospice care, with vulnerable women’s groups and with children in schools. From 2012 she was the Emergency Poet offering poetry on prescription from her vintage ambulance. She co-founded the world’s first walk-in Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire with her partner the poet James Sheard in 2019.

A mix of the therapeutic and the theatrical, Deborah offers consultations inside the Poetry Pharmacy and prescribes poems as cures as well as dispensing poemcetamols and other poetic pills and treatments.

She is editor of Emergency Poet-an anti-stress poetry anthology, #Me Too – rallying against sexual harassment- a women’s poetry anthology, Ten Poems of Happiness and co-edited with Dr Katie Amiel These Are the Hands-Poems from the Heart of the NHS. Her first full collection Dirty Laundry is published by Nine Arches Press.

Visit: Poetry Pharmacy

This talk was recorded on 8th December 2021.

Disability History Month 2021

 / Mike Layward: We are Invisible, We are Visible / Family Planning: The Lived Experience Through Art - Panel Discussion / Paul Darke: Why Bother? The Art of Disability - Practice Does Not Make the Perfect (Disrupting Bodies) / Sam Rapp: UN International Day for Disabled People / Deb Alma: Poetry on Prescription: Creative Writing & Wellbeing /Jennifer Gilbert: How a Manchester Gallery Supports Disabled and Neurodivergent Artists Tony Heaton: The Art of Disability History; A personal view through NDACA (the national disability arts collection and archive)