Diana Mitchener is an active member of two poetry groups in West Sussex and is Treasurer of Slipstream Poets. In 2016 she performed with Mandy Pannett and Geoffrey Winch as one of the ‘Indigo Three Poets’ at Chichester Festival and Arundel Festival. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in journals and anthologies as a result of entering competitions.
She has published three collections of poetry since taking an M.A. in Creative Writing at University of Chichester where she had been Senior Lecturer in Education until her retirement: Ten Poems for Performance, 2009; Corncockle, 2009, both self-published under Corncockle Press. My Lover’s Birds was published by Indigo Press in 2015.
A first prize in a national memoir competition run by Leaf Books led to the publication of her memoir Holding the Line in 2011. In 2015 a talk on memoir-writing was given to the Queen’s English Society (Arundel Branch). This talk has since been adapted as a lunch-time talk at Horsham Library and as an after-dinner speech to the Billingshurst branch of the Rotary Club.
Diana has moved from Ifold to Billingshurst to enjoy more time with young grand-children.