The Cheltenham Poetry Festival is hosting a series of online poetry readings.

This session’s featured readers include Eve Ellis and Isabelle Baafi, winner of the Best First Collection in the 2025 Forward Prizes.

Audience members interested in sharing their own work will be able to sign up on the open mic section of the event.

We are delighted to welcome Isabelle Baafi, the winner of the 2025 Jerwood Prize for First Collection (Forward Prizes), to this month's online poetry lounge

Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which was also shortlisted for TS Eliot Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She won First Prize in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2023 and Second Prize in the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2022. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.

About Chaotic Good
Chaotic Good offers beautiful, urgent poems to remake our breaking world. From the playground all the way to the marriage bed, these redemption songs return to heal and emancipate. —alice hiller

Isabelle Baafi is joined in the lounge by Eve Ellis, a London-based poet from the US. Twice long-listed for the National Poetry Competition, her poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry Wales, And Other Poems, Perverse, and elsewhere. Her debut pamphlet, Spit Valve, was published by ignitionpress in 2025. Eve is both an exciting new poet and an excellent performer of poetry. Spit Valve was described by Caroline Bird as a frankly massive achievement. 

The event will include an open mic. To book a slot (1 poem lasting not more than 2 minutes), please buy an open mic ticket - you do not need to buy a general admission ticket as well. When the open mic tickets have sold out, we will start a reserve lis. To join the list, please buy a general admission ticket for a minimum of £3 and email zoebrooks@cheltenhampoetryfestival.uk to ask to be put on the list.

The Poetry Festival receives no grant aid and so is entirely reliant on donations and ticket sales. While we have suggested a ticket price, tickets are pay-what-you-want, you can change the figure in the relevant box when you book your ticket. Please be generous.