Shamshad Khan

Saturday 12th August saw the first of this season's budding Creative Writing Development Workshops at Cross Corners Community Centre in Leicester. For the first workshop we had the pleasure of Shamshad Khan's knowledge, experience and expertise. Shamshad Khan is a performance poet specialising in children’s and women’s poetry. She has published ‘The Firepeople’ in 1998, Velocity in 2003 and ‘Masala’ poems for children in 2005. She is currently Literary Advisor to the Arts Council. Her poetry has been described as ‘delicately worded, yet strong in its messages.’ The participants of the workshop thoroughly enjoyed the day and some good work resulted from it. I'm sure they all found the workshop invaluable in helping them with their individual style of work. On a personal level it was great to meet Shamshad, see the 'old' participants again and welcome some new ones. The biggest highlight for me was when one of the new members was asked at the end by Shamshad how he found the poetry workshop, he answered 'Yesterday I was behind a closed door, today it has been opened.' What more can I ask?