Emily is a poet, playwright, performer, tutor and community arts facilitator. Winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, she performs her poetry at festivals and events. Her poetry collection, ‘On Becoming a Fish’ (published by Seren) was inspired by a series of walks around the 186 mile Pembrokeshire coastal path. She has won many literary awards for her poems which have been described as “edgy and assured” (Carol Ann Duffy), “subtly handled and atmospheric” (Doris Corti), and “crying out to be spoken” (Herbert Williams). She is especially interested in engaging audiences with poetry and ‘as an artist she tries new ways of presenting her work, always taking those necessary risks in order to reach out to new audiences.’ (Amy Wack). She combines poetry with animation, film, music and recently toured Wales with harpist Delyth Jenkins in their show ‘Salt on our Boots’.
For a year, she was writer in residence in Dylan Thomas’ travelling writing shed, working in schools across the country. She ran the Neath Port Talbot Young Writers Squad for 4 years and has taught in over 150 schools. Her most recent play ‘Cracked’ addressed mental health issues and toured Wales in 2019.
She co-founded the charity Awel Aman Tawe, and helped develop the largest community windfarm co-operative in Wales. She has been running arts and climate change events and workshops since 2010. She has edited two climate change poetry anthologies, and produced many plays responding to the theme. She has been poet-in-residence at several climate change conferences in UK and Europe. In 2012, she completed a long-distance walk across Wales in which she asked every person she met ‘Three Questions on Climate Change’. She intends to repeat this walk in the near future to see how public perceptions have changed.
