Julie Boden

Julie Boden has been poet in residence at THSH since 2005. She is a UK based poet, based in the Midlands, who travels nationally and internationally delivering workshops, conducting readings, performing, lecturing, mentoring and judging poetry competitions.

Julie has been writing poetry since childhood and was Birmingham Poet Laureate 2002/03 during which time she established the Oasis Café Theatre, a monthly multi-disciplined venue for the art at the Orange Studio in Birmingham. In 2004/05 she ran Poetry Central with Roz Goddard, another Birmingham Poet Laureate. With generous support from the Arts Council of England they set up numerous residencies for poets in the Midlands area, ran mentoring programmes for emerging and mid-career poets, organised a residential workshop on the performance of poetry at the Arvon Foundation’s house The Hurst in Shropshire, facilitated a number of touring exhibitions, performance events and readings and sewed many other poetic seeds around the region that have since flourished into magical poetry forests.

Julie’s own residency at THSH began as a small seed which has, over almost 5 years, developed woodlands of its own; facilitating a number of publications and exhibitions and promoting the Playing with Words and the Poems in Programmes initiatives. As a member of the Ladies Salon which was supported by the Arts Council of England and from Stipends from the artists retreat Can Serrat Julie was able to retreat to the mountains of Montserrat. Recently returning from Spain she has more seeds in her pocket that she feels may find fertile ground here at THSH. It seems no time since Julie’s residency here began and her fellowship at Hawthornden enabled her to write her Bluebeard’s Wife narrative which was written in the form of 18 sonnets and first performed here at Symphony Hall.

Thanks to support from the National Lottery through Arts Council, England she is now working on an exciting new project with the composer and pianist, Steve Tromans. This project was inspired by the piano room; a piano store room located behind the stage at Symphony Hall. The seeds of this project are now being sown and an event held at Symphony Hall in February 2010 should enable you to experience the woodland walk of their collaborative endeavours.

For more information on the piano room go to the “piano room section” of this site. More information about Julie and her work can be found on her website: www.julieboden.co.uk