Sammy Weaver

Sammy Weaver was born in Hereford and grew up in Hay-on-Wye.  She has an Anthropology BSc from University College London and a Creative Writing MA from Manchester Metropolitan University.  Her poems have appeared in The Moth, The Irish Times, The Island Review and Anthropocene, and have been anthologised in various collections.  She won The Moth Magazine’s Nature Writing competition in 2020.  She was shortlisted for a Northern Writers’ Award for poetry and Nine Arches Press' Primers scheme in 2021.  Sammy's first pamphlet Angola, America (Seren) won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021.

Her essays and reviews can be found online at Lucy Writers Platform. She has collaborated with various composers, most recently with Welsh composer Tywi Roberts on a reimagining of the Welsh myth Blodeuwedd.  The collaboration culminated in a multi-media chorale that was performed at the PRiSM Future Music Festival at the Royal Northern College of Music.  In 2021, Sammy’s poetry-film ‘Axolotl’ debuted at Newcastle University’s Beastly Landscapes: Investigations of Human-Non-Human Encounters Symposium.  She was writer-in-residence at the Julian Trust Night Shelter for the homeless in Bristol in 2017.

Sammy works for the Arvon Foundation as part of their programming and community outreach team based at their writing house, Lumb Bank.  She also works for the reading charity The Reader, delivering reading groups for wellbeing in prisons. She lives on a narrowboat in West Yorkshire.