Poetry at the Parsonage Day at Brontë Parsonage Museum

Head to Haworth for a day of poetry inspired by Yorkshire people, places and landscape by both established and new poets from across the region, including some of the former Brontë Writers in Residence.

Also sharing their work and creative processes are poets Christine Roseeta Walker and Rebecca Hurst, both published by Manchester’s Carcanet and PN Review, and Jenny Mitchell, who has recently been working on a series of poems re-telling the story of Jane Eyre from the perspective of a free woman of colour in the 19th century.

Taking place at West Lane Baptist Church, Haworth, opposite the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the day begins with a reading by poet Noor Jahangir, one of Bradford 2025’s Young Creatives, who is on placement with the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and closes with a performance by West Yorkshire’s Young Poet Laureate Ayeshah.

In between, you’ll get to hear from former Brontë Parsonage Writers-in-Residence Patience Agbabi, Maria Ferguson, Ian Humphreys and Zaffar Kunial.

Patience Agbabi FRSL is a poet, novelist, workshop facilitator and Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. She has performed all over the world and taught creative writing for 30 years, from primary to PhD. Her four poetry collections include Telling Tales (Canongate, 2014), a retelling of The Canterbury Tales, which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and was the Wales Book of the Year 2015.

Maria Ferguson’s poetry has been widely anthologised and published in literary magazines such as Magma, The Rialto, The North and The Poetry Review. In 2024, she created a collection of poems, Pathways, which was commissioned by the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She was a finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2024 and her debut collection, Alright, Girl? (Burning Eye, 2020), was highly commended in the Forward Prizes. Her second poetry collection, Swell, was published in 2025 by Penguin Random House. She is the associate producer of LIVEwire Poetry and she has been commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts, Stylist magazine and BBC Radio.

Award-winning Ian Humphreys was Writer in Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2023/24 and now co-runs Poetry at the Dusty Miller in Mytholmroyd – the next, on 7 October, features a rejigged line-up of Kim Moore, Matthew Paul and Molly Prosser. He edited the recent anthology of prose poetry inspired by the Brontës and the wild, No Net Ensnares Me (Calder Valley Press). His latest collection Tormentil (Nine Arches Press) won a Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters Award and was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2024. In 2025, he won the Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry for a collection inspired by the Brontës (work in progress). He is a Fellow of The Complete Works and has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry, and his work has been widely and internationally published by, among others, The Poetry Review, Poetry London and the BBC.

Zaffar Kunial is a recipient of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize. His first poetry collection, Us, was published by Faber and appeared on a number of shortlists including the Costa Poetry Award and the TS Eliot Prize. His latest book, England’s Green, was also shortlisted for the Eliot prize and it won the Ledbury Prize for best second collection. England’s Green was also The Times poetry book of the year. It’s also one of our faves.

The full day-long programme is available on the Parsonage website. Tickets are £25 / £18 concession.