Case Studies: Rhiannon Evans Poetry Scholarship
The Rhiannon Evans Poetry Scholarship celebrates students who demonstrate creative promise and have the talent to develop further.
Winners of this award have been recognised for their unique collection of unpublished poems and for developing their love of poetry into an innovative style of writing fuelled by a desire to further knowledge and hone writing skills.
We hope the students who have received a Rhiannon Evans Poetry Scholarship are inspired to pursue their writing further and realise their full potential as poets.
You can find out more about one of our Rhiannon Evans Poetry scholars by reading her profile below.
Joanne Ashcroft
Joanne Ashcroft has come a long way since making up poems in her head on the way to school. A lifelong love of poetry, and a developing talent for experimental verse, has won her Edge Hill's very first Rhiannon Evans poetry scholarship.
Inspired by the poetry modules she studied during her BA in Creative Writing and English at Edge Hill, Joanne started writing her own poems, experimenting with different techniques and using language in unusual ways. She then embarked on an MA to deepen her academic understanding of experimental poetry and hone her own developing skills.
As a member of the Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge Hill, Joanne's research focuses on performance poetry and procedural poetry.
"Procedural poetry involves using a found text - something that already exists - and using it to create a new piece of writing," explains Joanne. "I use procedures to systematically pick words out of a text which I then use to create poems. I love the creative process of this technique - it's fascinating to see how the character of the original text comes through in the new piece."
A former trainee nurse, Joanne has been known to use medical dictionaries to inform her work.
"I'm interested in words for the way they sound rather than their meaning," says Joanne, "so I use unconventional sources, like dictionaries or technical journals, as inspiration. I like to move away from the normal format for poetry and find different ways of constructing poems using sounds. It makes you look at language differently.
"I hadn't submitted any poems to external magazines or journals before because I wasn't sure if I was ready," adds Joanne. "I thought the scholarship was for people who were already quite far on in their writing, not for writers who are still finding their creative feet like me so I was surprised and delighted to win.
"Gaining this scholarship was like the reward for completing my MA. It has given me the confidence to get a collection of poems together and really push myself as a writer. I'm still hungry for knowledge and understanding of poetry so I hope to undertake a PhD in the future - the scholarship money will help towards realising that ambition."
Course: MA Creative Writing
