Dr Rachel Carney is a poet, visual artist and creative writing teacher based in Cardiff. Her debut poetry collection Octopus Mind is published by Seren Books, and was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2023.
She has seventeen years’ experience of planning and delivering learning activities for adults, and for children of all ages (primary and secondary), including special interest or community groups. She has previously developed workshops on a wide range of topics, including creative writing, storytelling, local history and literacy.
In 2021 she won the Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition, came 2nd in the Bangor Poetry Competition and was highly commended in the Liverpool Poetry Prize. She’s also had two poems shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and one poem nominated for the Forward Prize.
Rachel’s PhD research examines how ekphrastic poetry can complicate and enrich our engagement with art in museums, drawing on her experience of working in museums for several years. She worked in partnership with National Museum Wales to run two different engagement projects for this research: a series of online ekphrastic writing workshops that took place in 2021, with an interactive display on Instagram, and a series of museum-based in person ekphrastic workshops in 2022, with an interactive poetry display inviting museum visitors to participate by writing their own poems in response.
Rachel is also a literary critic and book blogger, reviewing a wide range of genres and literary events. She was a virtual poet in residence at the Cynon Valley Museum in 2020.
Topics that she has focused on in past workshops include: responding to visual art (ekphrasis), using imagery and metaphor, character and point of view, short stories, flash fiction, editing and revision, erasure poetry, the poetry of Edward Thomas, poetic forms, life-writing and blogging. She has also taught workshops on Poetic Inquiry as a method of research for PhD students, and neurodiversity awareness workshops for those teaching in HE.
From 2017 to 2020 she delivered a monthly community writing workshop (From Paint to Page: An Ekphrastic Writing Group) at The Gate Arts Centre. She has also recently worked as part of Explore Collective. More details of her work can be found on her blog: https://createdtoread.com/about/events-workshops-projects/