Development Director Appointed
The NWS board is delighted to announce that it has appointed Robin Vaughan-Williams to the new role of Development Director. The board created this role after NWS secured funding up until October 2011 from Arts Council England (ACE) and Robin, 35, brings to it a background in poetry, literature and community project organisation as well as a strong understanding of growth opportunities. He will now help the board to achieve the objectives spelled out in the successful ACE bid which include reducing our reliance on funding, increasing personal development & work opportunities for members, and continuing to raise the Studio’s profile both in and around Nottingham, and further afield.
A former projects administrator and finance & development worker with the Furnival Burngreave Community Projects in Sheffield, Robin is a poet and performer who has organised a range of innovative poetry and multimedia events. He has presented radio shows, engaged in collaborative and improvisational work, provided a platform for writers and played a significant role in developing the spoken word scene in Sheffield. He has delivered a range of writing workshops, including a series for Sheffield Young Writers and students, a Write Your Own Saga workshop on family history and various workshops aimed at producing materials for collaborative performance. These workshops have been supported by organisations such as Off the Shelf, Signposts, and Sheffield University Union of Students. Robin’s first writing collection, The Manager, was published by Happenstance Press in March 2010. He staged a poetry and music performance at the Off The Shelf Festival in 2009 and also writes arts and poetry reviews.
I hope that all members of NWS will join me in welcoming Robin when he takes up his role in the near future and are, like me, looking forward to the exciting changes that this new post will bring to the Studio’s development.
In the meantime, I would like to pay a warm and heartfelt tribute to Aly Stoneman for the tremendous contribution she has made to NWS as co-ordinator up until this point. Aly has been a popular and enthusiastic member of the team and has played a large part in continuing to establish NWS as a creative resource for novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists and all the other disciplines of writers we bring together. On behalf of the board, I offer Aly our sincere gratitude for all she has done, and to wish her well in her other endeavours, as her role of Coordinator now comes to a close. We have appointed Robin to help take us further forward in a more strategic direction, something which we felt was required after the latest successful ACE application.
Richard Pilgrim
Chair - Nottingham Writers' Studio
