Adam Cairns is a poet and essayist of the Welsh Marches. He divides his time between Herefordshire and Cardiff, and writes from the border country the Dymock poets walked: Thomas, Frost, Gibson, Abercrombie. His poems attend to landscape and legacy, to water, work and the things we maintain.
He holds an MA in Writing Poetry from the Poetry School and Newcastle University, and edits the Newport Stanza anthologies. His poems have appeared in Acumen, Anthropocene, Ink Sweat & Tears, London Grip, Poetry Wales, The Ekphrastic Review and The Honest Ulsterman, among others.
He writes two Substack publications: Beyond Solitude, for personal essays, and The Cutting Room, where poems are taken apart to see how they work.
Before poetry became his work he spent four decades in organisations, twenty years of them as chief executive of complex healthcare bodies. Through Poetry Works he brings the two together.
He is Chair of Ledbury Poetry, the organisation behind the Ledbury Poetry Festival.
Find Adam on Instagram at @adamcairnspoet, and on Bluesky at @adamcairnspoet.bsky.social.
