Drafting Table – Featured Poet Session

Welcome to Drafting Table, where we share our emerging poems with each other and provide feedback in a safe and inclusive environment.

Maybe you have been attending the Getting Started sessions and feel ready to edit your work and develop your ideas. Maybe you’re an experienced but unpublished poet who wants to take those next steps in your poetry career. Just bring a willingness to receive and provide feedback with the whole group!

Once a month, we invite a published poet to join us. There will be a short reading of their poems followed by a workshop where attendees can learn more about the creative process, get an insight into what it means to be a poet, and share our work with them.

This month’s poet is Laura Theis. Laura grew up in a place where each street was named after a different fairy tale. She writes in her second language. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Magma, Rattle, The Irish Times, Berlin Lit, and others. Her accolades include the Caterpillar Poetry Prize, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, the Hammond House International Literary Award, the AM Heath Prize, the Mogford Short Story Prize, and a Forward Prize nomination. Her poetry debut was the winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize, an Oxford Poetry Library Book-of-the-Month, and an Elgin Award nominee. Her collection A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things won the Live Canon Collection Prize and received the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors. Her most recent book, Introduction to Cloud Care, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2025 and her children’s debut Poems from a Witch’s Pocket, is coming out in September.

Feel free to email any queries to opldraftingtable@gmail.com