JonnyJAndrews

I serve on three Advisory Boards for graduate employment site Great with Disability, UK charity Ambitious About Autism, and the SHAPE Project run by the National Autistic Society and the University of York. I’ve also worked with My Plus Consulting and Employability, written a pamphlet on Autism in the Workplace which was very well received, worked with Creative Future and Burgess Autistic Trust, and regularly blog on autism and disability issues. I view poetry as another way to spread my message, raise awareness and ‘Form afresh/New truths from old malignant lies’ (a quote from my prizewinning poem, ‘Creativity’). But I also love poetry in-and-of-itself, for its lyrical genius, obscure (and at times obtuse!) technical rules, and its imagist qualities. I’ve written poetry since I was very young, on a myriad of different topics. These poems recount a lived experience of autism – a perspective which is too often ignored in favour of second-person narratives of what an autistic person seems to be thinking or feeling. I feel short, evocative snippets of this experience are the most powerful – and that the poetic form is the perfect medium to convey these.