Alice Willitts is a writer, editor and plantswoman from the Fens, and namechecks Nature as her forever co-author. She is the co-author of Something Light Written (Elephant Press, 2023), Think Thing: an ecopoetry practice, (Elephant Press, 2021), author of With Love, (winner of the Live Canon collection competition, 2020) and Dear, (winner of the Magma pamphlet competition, 2019). In Nov 2021 she was the grateful recipient of a DYCP grant from Art Council England to write her second collection Calls To Me Longingly which is forthcoming from Blue Diode Press in April 2025.
She founded and runs The 57 Poetry Collective in Cambridge and is the creator and Commissioning Editor of DIRT plantable poetry with Dialect Writers. She graduated with Distinction from the Creative Writing Poetry MA at UEA in 2018. She was shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize 2018 for the co-devised p0_EM experiment in fractal poetics. She has collected climate rebel stories for Channel Mag and was delighted to co-edit Magma 78: Collaborations issue (Nov 2020).
She believes in putting hope into action. She is a co-founder of On The Verge Cambridge actively increasing plants for pollinators throughout the city. River Cam Erasure is a protest poetry project raising awareness about damage to the Cam's chalk stream ecosystem.
Poetry Books
With Love, published by Live Canon, 2020.
Winning collection in the Live Canon Collection Competition 2020, judge Glyn Maxwell.
With Love, is both deeply affecting and engagingly mischievous. Some poems come scaffolded with notes more lyrical than the poems, others are one breath, others one word-per-line, and every single title begins with the word love. Many poets play these games, but Alice Willitts’ purposes are serious and exacting, her effects memorable and moving. - Glyn Maxwell
"Some books are so entirely themselves as to almost defy review... Poets make 'bad liars' because they see the necessary interconnectedness of everything, and the need for mending the weave. The great strength of With Love, is that it reminds us of this vision; it may be that poetry makes nothing happen, but it can point us to what is happening beyond our notice."
Read the full review of 'With Love,' by Billy Mills on his blog Elliptical Movements.
Dear, published by Magma, 2019.
Winning pamphlet in the Magma Pamphlet Competition 2018, judge Magma Board.
The poems in Dear, can neither be classified as grief poems nor eulogy, yet they manage the intensity and ecstasy of both. These are poems of embodiment, evoking the presence of something which is disintegrating or already gone; they do not seek to mend what is broken but rather to see it absolutely in its beautiful broken state. - Cheryl Moskowitz
Places of Poetry, Mapping The Nation In Verse, ed. Andrew McRae, Paul Farley, Oneworld Publications, 2020
I'll Show You Mine, A Journal Of Sex Writing, Dec 2019. Shortlisted poem published in the journal. Judge, Andrew McMillan.
cwpoetics experimental poetics collaboration, p0_EM, 2017/18. Shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize (Kings College London).
DIRT plantable poetry
https://www.dialect.org.uk/dirt : Alice is Commissioning Editor of DIRT plantable poetry, a carbon-positive imprint of Dialect Press.
In May 2020 JLM Morton and Alice Willitts launched the plantable poetry project DIRT. It's a new poetry imprint from Dialect for environmental poetry written in collaboration, and inspired by climate science, that will literally go back into the earth. We raised funds with a fantastic, crowdfunded campaign that enabled R&D for the publications and funded the prototype, a collaboration called Chapel. We now have a Substack to keep in touch with the growing DIRT community.
In 2024 Alice co-created the Seeds In The DIRT Imaginarium with Anglia Ruskin University's Global Sustainability Institute.
Blogs:
https://www.dialect.org.uk/blog/dirt
https://www.livecanon.co.uk/blog/dirt-alice-willitts
https://www.dialect.org.uk/blog/dirt-plantable-poetry
Social Media
Instagram @poetalicewillitts / Vimeo Visual projects and poem films / Facebook Alice Willitts Poet
Selection of Published Poems
Prototype 3, 2021
Tentacular Issue 7, Spring 2021
EcoTheo Review, Summer Issue 2020
Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal 4, Spring 2020
Finished Creatures 3, Spring 2020
Places of Poetry pinned poem, 2019
Places of Poetry pinned poem, 2019
I'll Show You Mine shortlisted, 2019
Read some poems here.
Non-fiction
Think Thing: an ecopoetry practice, Elephant Press, 2021, a hybrid essay-poem-interview exploring the ecopoetics of composite ecopoet kin'd & kin'd
Articles
The Pink Pathway, micro-essay, One Hand Clapping, 05/12/21
Co-editor Magma 78: Collaborations issue which includes interviews with poets SJ Fowler, kin'd & kin'd and Jess Chandler of Prototype publishing, written by Alice Willitts.
"Treat Every Place as the Centre", Channel Mag, 2020
"What Breaks Your Heart?", Channel Mag, 18/10/19
Other Projects
'Something Light Written' is on tour...
3 May 2023 - making of a collaborative, durational piece with Clare Whistler, responding to fifteen photographs of fallen leaves over fifteen hours in the presence of a young oak tree.
15/16th June 2023 - live editing and read-through performances at Elspeth Owen's Open Studios, The Pavilion, Granchester.
25/26th Nov 2023, book launch and four performances with the oak tree at Elspeth's.
Tour kicks off in 2024:
6 Jan with Clare's Oak - Ashburnham, Sussex
15/16 June with Nancy's Oak and saplings - Norfolk
21 Sept with Suffragette Oak, Kelvingrove - Glasgow
If you have a favourite Oak Tree you'd like us to bring our 26 minute performance to, please get in touch : somethinglightwritten at gmail dot com
Immersions: Into the River Cam, Robinson College, Cambridge
June 22nd-26th 2022
https://www.mattieocallaghan.com/curatorial-projects/immersions
