THE HEATH BOOKSHOP LITERATURE AND MUSIC FESTIVAL –

Join us for the final round of The Heath Bookshop Literature and Music Festival Open Mic Competition celebrating creativity, connection, and performance through music and performance. Watch brilliant performers compete for the chance to win an intimate headline gig at The Heath Bookshop. Judges include Casey Bailey, Adèle Oliver, and Chris Cleverley.

HOW TO ENTER

We will taking submissions from Friday 19th December until Saturday 28th February. Finalists will be informed and announced by Tuesday 17th March.

Calling all poets, spoken word artists, and acoustic musicians — the spotlight is waiting for you! As part of The Heath Bookshop Literature and Music Festival, we’re thrilled to announce our Open Mic Competition, celebrating creativity, connection, and performance.

🌟 How It Works

• Open to all levels — from emerging voices to established performers.
• Submissions can be solo or duo acts.
• All genres and styles welcome within poetry, spoken word, and acoustic performance.

Whether it’s your first time sharing your work or your hundredth, we can’t wait to see (and hear) what you create.

Round One – Video Submissions
Send us a short video (up to 2 minutes) of your performance, a photo of you, and a 30 word paragraph about yourself — poetry, spoken word, or acoustic music — by Saturday 28th February 2026. Send to hello@theheathbookshop.co.uk with the title “Open Mic Submission”.

The Heath Bookshop will review all submissions and select a shortlist of finalists.

You’ll find out if you’ve made it to the Live Final in April by Tuesday 17th March, 2026. Finalists will also be announced publicly using your photo and biography.

🎭 The Live Final

Finalists will perform live at  The Hare and Hounds as part of the The Heath Bookshop Literature & Music Festival on Sunday 19^th  April 2026 in front of a live audience and our panel of guest judges, including –

⭐ Casey Bailey – poet, educator, and former Birmingham Poet Laureate

⭐ Adèle Oliver – artist, curator, and creative producer

⭐ Chris Cleverley –  singer, songwriter, performer

Casey Bailey is an award-winning writer, performer, and educator from Nechells, Birmingham. He was Birmingham Poet Laureate (2020–2022). His short poetry collection From This Soil was published in 2021. His debut play GrimeBoy had a sold-out run at Birmingham Rep, and his second Please Do Not Touch was at Belgrade Theatre in 2024. His poetry has been widely commissioned and in 2022, he received a Royal Television Society award for Dear Brum. Casey has performed internationally and was made a Fellow of the University of Worcester and awarded an honorary doctorate in Education by Newman University in 2021. 

Adèle Oliver is a writer, artist and PhD researcher. Her current research focuses on the aesthetics, infrastructures and technologies of social change in Black electronic music in the UK, Brazil, and Portugal. Her book Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill counters panic-fuelled discourse on UK drill, gang violence, and knife crime, ‘deeping’ drill as a complex Black artform. Adèle is also a core member of Art Not Evidence and works as an expert witness in cases that use Black youth culture, music, and idiomatic language as evidence of bad character, criminality and/or gang affiliation. 

Chris Cleverley is a singer-songwriter exploring powerful, human themes from displaced people to the fragile beauty of our natural world, we travel with him from the arid deserts of Syria, to the rich Mediterranean sunsets of the Cretan coastline; a captivating voyage of place, landscape, season and self. A true guitar-man, his breathtaking fingerstyle technique dances above lush ambient soundscapes, drawing comparisons ranging from Lo-fi American Greats, Elliott Smith & Sufjan Stevens to UK guitar royalty John Martyn & Nic Jones; a curious tapestry weaved from the hazy psychedelia of the 60s folk revival and the soulful oblivion of the 90s Pacific Northwest.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

This event is part of The Heath Bookshop Literature & Music Festival and is supported by National Lottery Grants Funding through Arts Council England.

Tickets for this event will be released in January 2026.