The Dylan Thomas ‘Summer Soirées’ are a series of evening literary events co-organised by write4word and the School of English and Creative Writing at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The events are supported by Literature Wales and run in parallel with the Dylan Thomas International Summer School. This is a residential creative writing programme for American MFA students directed by writers Pamela Petro and Dominic Williams. All events are free entry and open to the public and showcase some of Wales finest professional writers, many with international profiles, in a diverse range of genres. The ambition is to present these writers in informal intimate settings to both an international and an often-isolated rural local audience.

Pamela Petro is an author, artist, and educator living in Northampton, MA. She has written four books of creative nonfiction including Travels in an Old Tongue, about Wales; Sitting up with the Dead, about the American South; and The Slow Breath of Stone, about Southwest France. Her latest book, The Long Field, a memoir set in Wales, was published in the UK in September 2021 by Little Toller Books, and will be brought out in American in Summer 2023 by Arcade Books. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, and others. She’s a winner of the Bedford Place Travel Writing Prize, and has received literary and visual arts residencies from Grand Canyon National Park, the MacDowell Colony, The Black Rock Arts Foundation, and The Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. Pamela teaches creative writing at Smith College and on Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, and is co-Director of the Dylan Thomas Summer School at the University of Wales, Trinity St Davids, where she is also a Fellow. She has widely exhibited her photography and has also created an artist book, AfterShadows – A Grand Canyon Narrative, and a graphic script, Under Paradise Valley.

Of The Long Field, Gillian Clarke, Wales’ longest-serving National Poet—Gillian has read here at Smith!—has said, “Not since Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek have I felt so involved, as a reader, in ‘finding out what it all means.’ This is a beautifully written, un-put-downable book about language, love, and being alive, here, now.”

Dominic Williams is a poet, a performer and creative mentor. Dominic is one half of the improvised spoken-word and movement act, Your Strangest Friend, with contemporary dancer Stina Nilsson and part of the FYD collective, an international group of contemporary artists from Serbia, Sweden, Croatia and Wales. In 2016 he collaborated on a poetry performance piece with Jonas Bengt Svensson and has worked with American film-maker Georg Koszulinski with film and poetry. Dominic is a poetry editor and has cooperated with poets translating work from Bengali, Turkish, Serbian and Swedish. Dominic also lectures at the Institute of Education and Humanities at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He has taught creative writing at other institutions in Ireland and Sweden. His latest publications are Pen & Paper: Punks in Print, an illustrated lyric essay (Kultivera Productions, 2021) and En galen man på tåget a collection of his poetry translated into Swedish (Magnus grehn förlag, 2022). In summer 2022 a vinyl album will be released which includes some of Dominic’s poetry accompanied by a three-piece punk band. The project, Unbearable Error, also features poetry from other contributors in Spanish, Serbian and Swedish