Untold Stories of the NHS Partners & Team

Reece Williams is Community Engagement Manager at Manchester City of Literature and a writer, performer and project manager. Reece leads MCoL’s Community Champion initiative and has worked with Jackie to deliver the Windrush strand of the Untold Stories project.

Jackie Bailey, the UNESCO Manchester City of Literature Community Champion who leads the Windrush NHS Stories project workstream, is a coach and freelance management consultant who has worked as an Equality and Diversity Manager at an NHS Foundation Trust.  Since 2012 Jackie has provided management consultancy and EDI training to a number of Foundation Trusts and Health bodies. A life coach and creative practitioner, Jackie, founder of BEE You! Personal Development Ltd, is passionate about helping people to embrace arts and literature.  Jackie’s work as a UNESCO Manchester City of Literature Community Champion draws on her coaching expertise and her experience in supporting people from minoritised communities, some who do not feel that literature is for them, to engage with literature and write creatively. Jackie is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan university.

Kim Wiltshire is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She has worked with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust’s in-house arts organisation Lime ArtS since 2004, as lead artist, community arts project manager and then on the advisory board. She has project managed large scale projects on health issues such as young people and alcohol misuse, Cystic Fibrosis and young people and sexual health, with funding from organisations such as Comic Relief and Children in Need. From March 2022 – July 2023 she is a British Academy Innovation Fellowship, working with Lime on the Create+ project exploring how to Embed the Arts in Healthcare Settings through arts workshops, a social prescribing project and a verbatim poem project. This Fellowship came out of her pioneering work with Lime during the pandemic where she was lead artist using online workshops for the mental wellbeing of MFT staff on a project called Create.Connect.Unwind. 

Dr Kim Moore is a poet and creative non-fiction writer.  Her pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and her first collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection.  Her first non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me was published by Smith/Doorstop in May 2022.  A hybrid book of lyric essays and poetry Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism was published by Seren in March 2023. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University where her research areas include sexism, class, gender and hybrid forms of writing.

Sarah Butler is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Butler is the author of three novels with Picador in the UK, and of several academic publications on the relationship between writing and place. In 2007 Butler established the literature consultancy UrbanWords which initiates and advises on projects where literature intersects with regeneration and place-making. In 2018 Butler collaborated with hidden homelessness charity Justlife, producing a novella Not Home in conversation with people living in unsupported temporary accommodation.

Jess Edwards is Professor of Place Writing and Head of the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. A founding member of the Department’s Centre for Place Writing, his research has dealt consistently over two decades with the relationship between writing and place in a range of contexts and historical periods. His most recent work has focused on the contemporary uses of literature and creative writing to reinforce or challenge established ideas of place-based identity in contexts from rural landscapes to hyperdiverse cities. 

Kirsten Jack was Professor of Nursing Education at Manchester Met until January 2023 and is now a freelance poetry therapist. Jack is an award-winning nurse educator with over 30 years of experience of nursing practice and education, who has published several studies of her use of poetry as a reflective practice enabling NHS professionals to process difficult experiences, and to cultivate practices of care for the self, colleagues and patients. In 2010 she led the development of an online resource Caring Words which is used internationally by students and educators to support the use of poetry in nursing education. 

Geoff Walton is Reader in Information and Digital Literacies at Manchester Met. He is a member of the Workforce Reference Group for the Workforce Planning and Development work-stream in Health Education England, which explores ways to develop the information practitioner workforce to support evidence-based practice across the NHS. Walton is currently working on a new essay collection, co-edited with senior HEE colleagues, aimed at health information practitioners and with contributions by academics and leading professionals from that community. Walton is also currently working with colleagues in MMU and HEE to develop a project to explore how poetry may offer a way of combating health misinformation.