Come and listen to some of the best poets from Yorkshire and beyond at Finding the Words, our relaxed and welcoming online poetry evening.

Parwana Fayyaz is a scholar and teacher of classical and medieval Persian literature, specialising in long narrative poems (masnavi). She is also a poet and translator working with multiple languages. Her first collection of poetry, Forty Names, inspired by the Afghan-Persian storytelling tradition, was published in 2021 and was named a New Statesman Book of the Year and a White Review Book of the Year. Forty Names is translated into Italian and Hebrew.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Parwana was raised as a refugee in Pakistan. She studied at Stanford, earning her B.A. in comparative literature and an M.A. in Religious Studies, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she completed her PhD in 2020. Shortly after, she was elected to a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge. She joined the University of Virginia's Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures as an assistant professor in January 2025. In the meantime, she is working on her second book of poetry on Kabul.

Stephen Keeler is a writer, memoirist and poet. His memoir 50 Words for Love in Swedish won the People’s Book Prize Beryl Bainbridge Award in 2023. His small poetry collection Scar Tissue won a Coast to Coast to Coast award in 2020 and his acclaimed collection They Spoke No English is published by Nine Pens Press. He is the recipient of a Scottish Book Trust Writing Award and his poems are widely published in magazines, journals, online and in anthologies. A number of his poems appear in pamphlets published by Candlestick Press for whom he edited and introduced a small anthology of poems about running. He has been writer-in-residence in Grez-sur-Loing, France, and in 2023 held a prestigious writing residency under the auspices of Västra Götalands Cultural Programme at the municipal libraries in Skara, south-west Sweden.

Rob Miles is from South Devon, and he lives in Leeds where he is Fellow in Film Studies at The University of Leeds. His poetry has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, recently in Stand, New Welsh Review, The Scores, Spelt, 14 Magazine, Ink, Sweat and Tears, One Hand Clapping, Poetry Wales, and four Candlestick Press pamphlets. He has won various awards including the Philip Larkin Prize, the Resurgence International Ecopoetry Prize, and the Poets & Players Prize. His recent collection, Dimmet, is published by Broken Sleep Books. Of Dimmet, Katharine Towers notes: ‘These are poems of great precision and delicacy’; Lucy Newlyn describes it as ‘[t]he best collection of contemporary poetry I have read in a long while’, and John Glenday writes: ‘When it’s done as well as this, there’s nowhere on earth poetry can’t go.’

At Explore we keep all our events free or low cost to enable everyone to attend. When you book your place, if you can, please make a donation to help with Explore's costs and enable us to continue running events like this one.