Open Mic Competition Final with Judges!

Date: Sunday 19th April

Time: 17:45 – 19:15 (doors open 17:15)

Ticket Price: £8.00

Venue: Venue 1, Hare & Hounds, High Street, Kings Heath, B14 7JZ

Ages 14+ / U16s accompanied by an adult

Join us for the final round of The Heath Bookshop Literature and Music Festival Open Mic Competition celebrating creativity, connection, and performance through music and spoken word performances. Watch brilliant performers compete for the chance to win an intimate headline gig at The Heath Bookshop. Judged by Casey Bailey, Adele Oliver and Chris Cleverley. 

The open mic competition was advertised on social media and via The Heath Bookshop mailing list in late 2025 and early 2026. The closing date for entrants was 31st January 2026.

This event is part of The Heath Bookshop Literature & Music Festival and is supported by National Lottery Grants Funding through Arts Council England. For full festival programme information go to www.theheathbookshop.co.uk

This event will have a BSL interpreter present

Bios:

Casey Baileyis an award-winning writer, performer, and educator from Nechells, Birmingham. He was Birmingham Poet Laureate (2020–2022). His short poetry collection From This Soil was published in 2021. His debut play GrimeBoy had a sold-out run at Birmingham Rep, and his Second Please Do Not Touch was at Belgrade Theatre in 2024. His poetry has been widely commissioned and in 2022, he received a Royal Television Society award for Dear Brum. Casey has performed internationally and was made a Fellow of the University of Worcester and awarded an honorary doctorate in Education by Newman University in 2021.

Adèle Oliver is a writer, artist and PhD researcher. Her current research focuses on the aesthetics, infrastructures and technologies of social change in Black electronic music in the UK, Brazil, and Portugal. Her book Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill counters panic-fuelled discourse on UK drill, gang violence, and knife crime, ‘deeping’ drill as a complex Black artform. Adèle is also a core member of Art Not Evidence and works as an expert witness in cases that use Black youth culture, music, and idiomatic language as evidence of bad character, criminality and/or gang affiliation.

Chris Cleverley is a singer-songwriter exploring powerful, human themes from displaced people to the fragile beauty of our natural world, we travel with him from the arid deserts of Syria, to the rich Mediterranean sunsets of the Cretan coastline; a captivating voyage of place, landscape, season and self. A true guitar-man, his breathtaking fingerstyle technique dances above lush ambient soundscapes, drawing comparisons ranging from Lo-fi American Greats, Elliott Smith & Sufjan Stevens to UK guitar royalty John Martyn & Nic Jones; a curious tapestry weaved from the hazy psychedelia of the 60s folk revival and the soulful oblivion of the 90s Pacific Northwest.