Alex Vellis is an award winning poet, published author, and playwright from Canterbury, Kent. He is the poet in residence for Wise Words Festival (Kent), the Eleto Chocolate Café, and Canterbury Connected (BID).Alex’s writing draws on the ideas of love, loss, and feeling lost; of family matters, sex, gender identity and hope. He was the 2015 Wise Words Grand Slam champion, and has since gone on to set up his own slams across the city, in addition to running the ‘poet in residence’ scheme with the “Rough Cut Collective” in Canterbury.
Alex launched his debut show, ‘Everything Is Terrible’, at a sold-out show at Wise Words Festival in 2017, and looks to tour in in 2018.
Alex is a prominent member of the ‘Rough Cut Collective’ a Kent based group of artists led by Workers-Of-Art, and a main player in the artistic scene in the Canterbury community.
He also mentors a group of young poets (aged 17 to 25) helping them achieve what they want from a literary career. As well as running a page for artists of different mediums that want to collaborate on new and existing work called “Vertex”
Alex has been commissioned by the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury to write a play for their “Return Of The Unknown” project, celebrating the centenary of the end of the First Word War. The play debuted on November 10th 2017.
In 2017, Alex was an assistant producer for the Wise Words festival in Canterbury.
His first poetry collection ‘Everything Is Terrible’ was published by Whisky and Beards in 2016 and can be purchased on Amazon.
Other collections of his work include ‘Journal Entries’ (self-published, 2015), ‘Talking With Impossible Gods’ (Whisky and Beards E-Book, 2016), and ‘Unmarked Graves’ (a pamphlet, Whisky and Beards E-Book, 2016). His second paperback collection, “For Friends & Family” was released February 2018. An updated version of “Everything is Terrible” is due out this year, featuring Alex’s digital chapbooks.His next collection ‘Ships In The Night’ is set to be published late 2018.
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