Steve Xerri has been a teacher, musician and designer. He is now dividing his time between making pots and writing poems.
He started writing for his school magazine, took verses along to his college poetry reading group as a student, contributed pieces to his students’ magazines when he was a teacher, and in his days as a designer would sneak into a spare office at lunchtime to compose more poems, which were destined to languish in his desk drawer.
His words had only received anything like wide exposure when he sang them on a pair of John Peel sessions with the band he belonged to – until he began seriously to pursue publication in online and print magazines, and to participate in the pleasures of workshopping with his local Poetry Society Stanza.
He won the title of Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year 2017 and the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition in May 2019. His work has been shortlisted in the Cinnamon Press pamphlet competition and the Fish Publishing poetry contest (three times) and, on one occasion, he had a poem nominated for the Forward Prize. In 2021, and again in 2022, he was longlisted for the Live Canon International Poetry Competition and makes an appearance in the resulting Anthologies.
In May 2019 his poems Bird Music : Aubade and Nocturne (available in Mutter/Land) were read as part of the programme ‘Birds of Paradise’ in St Mary-le-Bow church on Cheapside during the Brandenburg Choral Festival.
To contact him please send an email to info@stevexerripoetry.co.uk