By Lisa Ventura MBE FCIIS, Founder and former Festival Director of the Worcestershire Literary Festival in 2011, 2012 and 2013 (today known as Worcestershire Lit Fest & Fringe)

There are evenings that do more than fill a room. Last night at Tipsy Toast on Broad Street in Worcester was one of them.

“Laureate in the Wild” is the new poetry night launched by Jay Rose Ana, the current Worcestershire Poet Laureate, and it landed with exactly the sort of warmth, welcome and unforced energy that a laureateship should generate. Less than two months into her tenure, Jay has already done something that takes many people a full term to achieve. She has got the room talking to itself again.

The Night Itself

The line-up was generous in every sense. There were poets performing who have been part of the Worcester scene for years, some of whom I hadn’t seen for a very long time, alongside voices that have not been heard live in the city for far too long. Clive Oseman and Nick Lovell both performed, and hearing Moggs again was amazing. Derek Dohren delivered a piece of unsettling suburban surrealism that had the room hooked, but I wasn’t 100% sure what species the doomed Samantha was, which is very much the point of a good poem. DK, Maria Tee and Robert Punton represented the strength of the current Worcester scene. And we were treated to the first ever performance of a brand-new poem, “And all of Us Old Women” by my lovely friend Suz Winspear, a piece that had clearly been lived with, argued with and revised for months before it finally made it to a microphone. It was more than worth the wait.

Tipsy Toast proved a lovely venue, and huge thanks are due to Nitin Mathur, Aditi and the whole team there. There is a widely held view that poets can eat anything put in front of them. Last night disproved it. Several people went home with samosas for breakfast, including me.

But the food and the venue are not what made the night. What made the night was Jay.

What Jay Rose Ana Is Doing Right as Worcestershire Poet Laureate

A poet laureate can be a title, or it can be a role. Jay has understood from the outset that it is a role, and that the job is not to stand at the front and be admired. The job is to make space for other people to be heard, and as she said so herself, her role is to go out there as much as possible and most importantly – she should listen to what others have to say.

“Laureate in the Wild” is a night built on that principle. It brought back poets who had drifted away from performing. It sat them alongside people who are just finding their voice now. It did not create a hierarchy between them. It felt like a reconnection of fifteen years of poetry performance in Worcester, which is not a small thing to achieve in a single evening, and certainly not eight weeks into her appointment.

Jay’s own words afterwards said it better than any review could: listening to other people’s voices and stories is what it is all about for her. That instinct, to turn the platform outwards rather than inwards, is the whole ballgame. It is what separates a laureate who holds a title from a laureate who changes a literary scene. Jay has already changed the literary scene in Worcestershire tenfold. And a wonderful touch was that she handed out raffle tickets to every member of the audience and said that whichever person had the “winning” number, she would donate £100 to a charity chosen by the person who had the winning number, which was inspired and brilliant all in equal measure. Jay is also all about supporting other poetry groups, collaboration and community, so we got to hear about the brilliant work that Sabrina Poets and AccessAbility Arts is doing amongst other groups as well.

Sadly by 9.30pm I was seriously flagging and it was so hot in the venue, so I had to give up and retreat home to the coolness of my air conditioning system. I’ve written before that I suffer from extreme heat sensitivity as an #OpenlyNeurodivergent person, and on top of that weeks of getting up at 5.00am to take my beloved dog Poppy for a walk before it gets too hot for her had caught up with me. Ironically, I had written a poem to read about the heat. But I’m sure I’ll get the chance to read it at another spoken word event soon.

Why This Matters So Much to Me

I founded the Worcestershire Literary Festival in June 2011 and served as its Festival Director, running it in 2011, 2012 and 2013. My idea for the festival began life in Autumn 2010 when I thought about launching it for just the city of Worcester. But the interest in it was huge; I remember holding a public meeting about it in the old AIR café bar at the end of Broad Street, literally a couple of doors down from There Tipsy Toast is today, and over 60 people came to that meeting from all kinds of different arts and culture community groups. The County Arts Officer from Worcestershire County Council Stephen Wilson was there, as was Giovanni “Spoz” Esposito who was a former Birmingham Poet Laureate, and Sylvia Herbert who was the Chair of the Worcester Writers’ Circle, who today is one of my closest friends. Lauren Rogers, who was a journalist at the time at the Worcester News was there too along with other members of the local press and radio. Feedback from that meeting was that the festival shouldn’t be restricted to just the city of Worcester, and so the Worcestershire Literary Festival, known today as the Worcestershire Lit Fest & Fringe, was born.

The Worcestershire Poet Laureate was my creation. Back in 2011 the campaign to find and appoint the county’s first laureate was called “A Bard for Worcestershire”. The idea behind it was simple and, at the time, I had NO idea if it would even work. I looked around the immediate area and could see that Birmingham had its own Poet Laureate, as did Stratford-Upon-Avon, so I thought if those two cities could have a Poet Laureate, why can’t Worcestershire? The county had a deep well of writing talent that nobody outside the county had heard of, and quite a lot of people inside it had not heard of either. In my mind a laureate could be the person who went looking for those voices, giving them them somewhere to stand and made the case that poetry in this county belonged to everybody rather than to just a small circle.

That was my vision. Fifteen years later, sitting in a room on Broad Street watching Jay Rose Ana do precisely that, I felt something I had not expected to feel quite so strongly. She is everything I hoped a Worcestershire Poet Laureate would be. There have been some incredible poet laureates of Worcestershire over the years including Paul Robert who was last year’s Worcestershire Poet Laureate, my good friend Suz Winspear who was poet laureate in 2016, Freddie Barker, Maggie Doyle, Ade Couper, Fergus McGonigal and Damon Lord amongst others. I will never forget the appointment of Theo Theobald at the launch of the 2011 Worcestershire Literary Festival in Worcester Cathedral who won with his “Worcestershire Sauce” poem. Lea and Perrins even heard about it and the following week several cases of Worcestershire Sauce arrived in my office for Theo. It was an extraordinary time!

The Years In Between

However, I stepped away from all of it in 2013.

At the time, I was pregnant with my only son Frankie after suffering 6 early miscarriages with my ex-wife during the June 2013 festival, and I suffered horrendous nausea and sickness, but I carried on through it to deliver the festival regardless. Then in September 2013 when I was 5 months pregnant which was a huge achievement after the miscarriages I had, I discovered that I was having a boy, but he had a very severe cleft lip and palate. I named him Francesco “Frankie” Enrico Ventura, as a nod to my Italian heritage. Then in October 2013 another diagnosis came – non-positional talipes which meant he wouldn’t ever walk, as well as the severe cleft lip and palate. Frankie would need round the clock 24-hour care so as his mother, I had no hesitation in walking away from the very thing I had founded and built, and I prepared for a life of being a full-time mother. But something up there had other plans for my precious son.

Frankie was born sleeping on 29 November 2013. When he died, something in me died as well. I didn’t go back to the festival, and I stopped everything to do with writing and poetry altogether. It was not a decision so much as a complete shutting down. The words simply stopped coming, and through my grief, I could not see a route back to them. Instead, I founded Frankie’s Legacy, and threw myself into raising awareness of early miscarriage, cleft lip/palate, stillbirth and rare chromosome disorders. We found out after Frankie was born that Frankie had two identical copies of chromosome number 15 and would have been severely mentally and physically disabled had he not been born sleeping, and he was spared from a lifetime of pain and suffering.

What came next was a very different life, and one that I could never have dreamt would happen to me in a million years. I had another four early miscarriages with my husband and in 2015 I was diagnosed with a rare condition called hyperfertility. My dream of being a mother was over, so I built a career in cyber security instead. I founded the UK Cyber Security Association. I have keynoted at more conferences and events than I can now count, had a great many articles published, written two cyber security books and three volumes of a book series comprising “The Rise of the Cyber Women” and “The Varied Origins of the Cyber Men”. I have won awards I never expected even be nominated for, let alone win.

In June 2023 I was awarded an MBE in King Charles III’s first birthday honours list for services to cyber security and to diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion. I became a chartered cyber security practitioner through my Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Information Security and was appointed a member of The Security Institute. I launched Cyber Kindness, founded Unity Group Solutions Limited, founded Neuro Unity and founded the AI and Cyber Security Association (AICSA). It wasn’t the life I thought I would have, but it is a life and career that I love despite not being a mother, and I hope my Frankie is up there looking down at me and everything I am doing, until the day I am reunited with him once again.

And then in early 2025, I was going through a load of folders and files on an old hard drive and found all the poems I had written, and all the work I had done on the festival. So, after a decade of silence, I went back to poetry with the publication of my first collection, “The Show Must Go On” and I also went back to performing my poetry at spoken word events. In the words of Harrison Ford as Han Solo in the film “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” – Chewie, we’re home. I had finally come home to what I love after a long time away, to poetry, and it was amazing.

Things to Come

Jay Rose Ana has not only made a big impact already as Worcestershire Poet Laureate with the launch of “Laureate in the Wild”, but she also has also launched two other initiatives. One is for National Poetry Day to submit a poem on the theme of “I Wonder…” which can be read at an event she is running at The Hive in Worcester on 1 October 2026, and the other is called “Hello Bab”, which is a travelling poetry conversation project. Wherever the bench goes, people are invited to pause, talk, listen and share. More information can be found on Jay’s website www.jayroseana.com.

Final Thoughts:

So last night was not just a good poetry night, although it absolutely was that. For me, it was the thing I set up in 2011 still running, still finding new voices, and still handing the microphone to whoever has something to say, under a laureate who gets it completely. I couldn’t have been happier last night seeing the thing that I created still so very much alive, I was bursting with pride.

Jay Rose Ana has the rest of her tenure still to run. If “Laureate in the Wild” is what she can build in less than two months, Worcestershire is in for a very good year. I’ve only met Jay twice so far, but I can’t wait to get to know her better and see her plans as Worcestershire Poet Laureate come to fruition.

Thank you, Jay. And thank you to everyone who came out to Tipsy Toast on Broad Street to listen. I can’t wait till the next event!