Poems and Stories with Poets Tom Kelly & Alistair Robinson

Free, booking required

Join local Poets Tom and Alistair for an afternoon of poetry and stories with a local flavour.

About Tom

Tom Kelly is a Jarrow-born writer now living further up the Tyne at Blaydon. He has written many plays and five musicals, The Machine Gunners, Dan Dare, Tom & Catherine, The Dolly Mixtures and Rooney. with the late John Miles. His fourteenth collection of poems and prose These Are My Bounds was published this March by Red Squirrel Press who are celebrating their twentieth year of publishing.

Tom has worked with a number of musicians including Alan Price on the musical Kelly which was the subject of a BBC TV I & 2 documentary. More recently he wrote, with Graeme Thompson, Songs of the North East which ended its second tour in 2025. He was delighted his play Finding Dolly, was part of the production, devoted to the legendary South Shields rebel Dolly Peel in September 2025 at the Customs House.

About Alistair 

Alistair Robinson is a Whitburn-born writer and musician. A former arts journalist, he recently retired from Sunderland University, where he was Programme Leader for Journalism. He is the author of a history of the Sunderland Empire theatre and in 2006 was commissioned to write a history of Sunderland to be presented to the mayor of Washington DC to mark a friendship agreement between the two cities. He studied modern history at Durham University; his PhD was awarded in 2023 for his thesis on the founding of the Shields Gazette.

Alistair has written three collections of poetry published by Red Squirrel Press: Stereograms of the Dead, The Land before Yoghurt, and As Blind as Rain. In 2004 he won a Northern Promise Award from New Writing North. For many years he played guitar with his Bicycle Thieves jazz trio. His compositions for the band’s debut album, Stolen Moment, were published in the USA by Bug Music.

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