Name: Launch of New Poetry by Alice Willitts and Marianne MacRae, with Ellen Renton and JLM Morton
Start: 2025-03-17T19:30:00+00:00
Location: 4a Haddington Place, EH7 4AE Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Launch of New Poetry by Alice Willitts and Marianne MacRae, with Ellen Renton and JLM Morton

Ellen Renton and JLM Morton read in support of new poetry collections from Marianne MacRae (‘Recital’) and Alice Willitts (‘Kiss My Earth'), both published by Blue Diode Press.
Alice Willitts is a plantswoman from The Fens; she leads The 57, a women’s poetry collective; is editor of the plantable poetry project DIRT; co-edited Magma 78 on the theme of Collaborations; is a founding member of the biodiversity project On The Verge Cambridge. Kiss My Earth (Blue Diode) is her second collection following Something Light Written (Elephant Press, 2023), With Love, (winner of the Live Canon collection competition, 2020), Dear, (winner of the Magma pamphlet competition, 2019). Her non-fiction includes Think Thing: an ecopoetry practice (Elephant Press, 2021).
Marianne MacRae is an Edinburgh-based writer and artist. She won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the 2024 Rialto Nature and Place competition. Her work has been published in Magma, Gutter, Ambit and The Oxford Review, amongst others. Her debut collection, 'Recital', is published by Blue Diode.
Ellen Renton is a poet, performer, and theatre maker from Edinburgh.
Her debut pamphlet ‘An Eye For An Eye For An Eye’ was published by Stewed Rhubarb Press in 2021, and with musician and DJ Lord of the Isles she co-released the album ‘My Noise is Nothing’ in 2023. She has been a Jerwood Fellow, a Cove Park Emerging Writer Awardee, and an Edwin Morgan Trust Disability Arts Online Associate. She is currently on the Clydebuilt writers programme.

JLM Morton is a community arts producer, celebrant and education consultant based in Gloucestershire. Her poetry appears in Poetry Review, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Berlin Lit, Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, Poetry Archive and elsewhere. Highly commended by the Forward Prizes, her first collection is Red Handed, a Poetry Society Book of the Year out now with Broken Sleep Books (2024). At present, she’s poet in residence at Sladebank Woods, a semi-urban woodland sandwiched between a housing estate and the Cotswold Hills, where she’s writing her next book with support from an SoA Author’s Foundation grant.