About

Having worked for thirty years as an English teacher, during which time my students were renowned for winning poetry competitions, I am now working as a freelance poet, writer and workshop leader. I had already been working in this area for over ten years, combining it with teaching English, leading workshops and courses in the UK and abroad, using the approach described in my book, Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School (Poetry Society).

I was born in Handsworth, and grew up in Birmingham and Kidderminster. I left school at 16, for the printing factory. Suddenly realising what I was missing, I returned to further education and went on to obtain degrees from the University of Wales in Swansea and the University of Warwick. After a few adventures, I became an English teacher in Cheshire, where I settled down with my family. It was here that I started writing poems, after a workshop with the great Pete Morgan on an INSET course for English teachers in Anglesey.

Encouraged by Ian McMillan, I started sending out poems to magazines such as The North and The Wide Skirt. I published a pamphlet, 14 Ways of Listening to the Archers (Smith/Doorstop, 1994) and then a full-length collection Henry’s Clock (Smith/Doorstop, 1999), which won the Aldeburgh First Collection prize and the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. I published another pamphlet, Emergency Rations (Smith/Doorstop, 2004) and the Arts Council gave me a Writer’s Award to complete my most recent collection, Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (Salt, 2009), and, more recently, a Grant for the Arts to write a new book.

After teaching in Cheshire, I went on to Maharishi School in Skelmersdale, where my students gained a reputation for winning awards for their writing. They were regular winners of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Awards, the WH Smith Young Writers, Young Poets on the Underground, the Roald Dahl Foundation Poetry Competition and many more. Their work featured regularly in the TES Young Poet column, and was published in various anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. As a result of this success, I wrote Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School for the Poetry Society, now in its second edition.

While I was teaching English, I completed a PhD in Poetry & Poetics and played a leading part in several Poetry Society educational initiatives. I am a tutor for the Arvon Foundation and I’ve led courses and workshops in schools, universities and for organisations such as NATE, AQA, the British Council, the Poetry Business and the Poetry School. I have worked with writers of all ages and abilities, including five-year olds, experienced poets working on their second collection and retired people unused to writing poetry. I work extensively with teachers and trainee teachers, and I have taught Creative Writing in Higher Education.

I also work as a performer, and have read poems at dozens of venues, most recently at the first Cheltenham Poetry Festival and with Jackie Kay at Ledbury Poetry Festival. I have spoken at many conferences, including UKLA, Writing Together and NATE (Wales) and I regularly lead workshops at NATE conference.

These days I am based in Gloucestershire, within easy reach of the West Midlands. I travel all over the place, performing, going into schools, working with teachers, inspiring people to write, and, of course, writing poems.

See the workshops page and the introduction to Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School for more information about my approach to teaching poetry

“the guru” – GUARDIAN

“passionate about poetry” – TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT

“Cliff Yates is one of my favourite poets, writing in an idiom I’d like to call ‘Skelmersdale Mystic/Domestic’ if he was in a band that band would produce hit singles that would linger in your head for years and if he was a greengrocer his vegetables would always be startling shapes. There’s childhood here, and love, and a way of seeing the world with the wrappers off that is, ultimately, Yatesian” – IAN MCMILLAN.

“Cliff Yates is an absolutely remarkable workshop leader and teacher of poetry whose own pupils have consistently won prizes in poetry competitions for young people. He is one of the best in the country working as a writer in schools. Highly experienced as a teacher, he can inspire staff as well as pupils through workshops which get to the heart of what writing is all about” – CHRIS MEADE, Director of if:book & former director of the Poetry Society.

“The work that Cliff Yates has done for poetry with children, and for children with poetry, is exceptional and heartening. He is at once expert and inspiring – always proving how necessary it is to recognise that ‘creating’ is a vital part of ‘educating’ “– ANDREW MOTION.