Deborah Alma

Deborah Alma is a UK poet, editor and bookseller. She has worked using poetry with people with dementia, in hospice care, with women’s groups and with children in schools and taught at both Worcester and Keele universities. From 2012 she was the Emergency Poet, offering poetry on prescription from her vintage ambulance. She co-founded the world’s first walk-in Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire with her partner the poet James Sheard in 2019, which now has a second branch inside Lush Spa on Oxford Street in London. She is editor of #Me Too: rallying against sexual harassment, a women’s poetry anthology, Ten Poems of Happiness from Candlestick Press, and co-edited with Dr Katie Amiel These Are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS. She is also editor of The National Trust’s Nature Poems. Her first full collection of poems Dirty Laundry is published by Nine Arches Press. She is co-author with Mark Constantine of The Poetry Business School and is editor of the Poetry Pharmacy series with Macmillan, in 2025.