Denise Bennett has an MA in creative writing and has taught this subject for 28 years at Portsmouth College. She now runs poetry workshops in community settings and also facilitates writing activities for two local U3A writing groups. Her work has been widely published in journals and she has published two full collections, Planting the Snow Queen (2011) and Parachute Silk (2015), both from Oversteps Books, and a pamphlet collection Water Chits (2017), from Indigo Dreams.
 
She enjoys writing creative narrative poetry in response local historical events. Much of her work has been inspired by her research in Portsmouth City Museum, Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and Portsmouth History Centre. She has co-edited This Island City, an anthology of poems about Portsmouth, and written a sequence of poems about the sinking of The Royal George, which foundered off Spithead with the loss of nine hundred lives. Her work has also appeared in A Hard Choice, a booklet of poems produced in response to items displayed in Portsmouth City Museum. Denise has produced a number of poems about HMS M33, the only surviving gun boat from the Gallipoli Campaign, now berthed next to HMS Victory. Water Chits, the title poem of her latest collection, a poem about the lack of water at Gallipoli, was written in response to a letter written by a bandsman/medic.
 
Denise regularly reads her work at Tongues and Grooves poetry events at the Square Tower Portsmouth and in The Spring Arts Centre in Havant at the Front Room spoken word events. She is currently working on her next collection which will have many more poems generated by her research into local history.
 
In 2012 her poem The Foundling was awarded First Prize in the Hastings Poetry Competition.
 
In 2013 her poem Parachute Silk was awarded first prize In the Havant Literary Festival Poetry Competition.
 
 
Anthologies:
 

 
Her Wings of Glass, ed. Myra Schneider, Penelope Shuttle, Dilys Wood, 2014, Second Light Publications, ISBN 978-0-9927088-0-1
 
Songs for the Unsung, ed. Joy Howard, 2017, Grey Hen Press, ISBN 978-0-9933756-4-4
 
Stanley Spencer Poems ed. Jane Draycott, Carolyn Leder and Peter Robinson, 2017, Two Rivers Press, ISBN 978-1-9097472-7-2
 
Adlestrop Remembered, ed. Victoria Huxley, 2014, Windrush Publishing Services (avail. from Amazon) ISBN 978-0-9575150-3-1