Wolverhampton Literature Festival was a vibrant annual event celebrating literature, poetry, music, and the arts. In 2020, the festival partnered with OVERHEAR to commission ten local poets to write about ten beloved independent city venues in Wolverhampton. These poems were recorded and virtually “pinned” to their respective locations, allowing festival-goers to discover and collect them

In Autumn 2018, we worked in collaboration with Birmingham Literature Festival to add a little something extra to their programme. We commissioned 12 writers to create bespoke poems (and one short story!) inspired by venues around the city centre, where BLF were hosting events.

This collaboration between the Barber Institute and Overhear materialised from local Cultural Central meeting over the Covid19 pandemic and how arts organisations are adapting to working remotely with artists and creatives.

When protestors in Bristol brought down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston in their city, it sparked a national conversation about the value and purpose of public art in our lives. Given that Overhear is all about giving people the power to write their own narratives onto their spaces, we thought it was the