The Writers of Wales Database
Mike works full time as a poet, teacher and educational journalist providing stimulus and framework for the development of projects in schools, the community, colleges. Mike has spent a lifetime teaching English in both primary and secondary schools. He has been working as a full time writer in education since April 1998. An assistant examiner for GCSE English and contributor to most national educational journals, Mike is currently working in schools in North Wales developing poetry awareness with Early Years children as part of the BBC CBeebies project, Poetry Pie.
Since the early 1990s Mike Kivi has established a sound reputation as a freelance writer especially in the areas of ‘Educational’ poetry. He has written both poetry and prose for a wide range of journals but, in particular, has contributed to Longman’s Education, and its successor Education Journal, The Teacher (journal of the National Union of Teachers), Headlines (journal of The Secondary Heads Association), and wrote, significantly, on the teaching of poetry in Questions Publishing’s Literacy and Learning magazine.
Mike has contributed poetry to The Times Educational Supplement, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and countless, less familiar journals such as Jazz News and, in times long past, The Merseybeat pop newspaper. His published poetry collections are listed below but individual poems have appeared in anthologies published by MacMillan, Scholastic and Oxford University Press. Mike’s poetry also appears in the GCSE anthology Visible Voices where he finds himself snugly in the index twixt Keats and Larkin.
Mike has also produced The Early Word, a text book for teachers of nursery and foundation years teachers which sets out an accessible scheme for the development of language and socialisation in this age group. He is currently working on a poetry anthology for older teenagers. To read a poem from this forthcoming collection, click here.
Potent Poems for Pole-axed Pedagogue (Trentham Books, 1992)
Verse to Reverse the Classroom Blues (Trentham Books, 1992)
One Flew Over the Internet (Sampson Low, 1998)
Why Me? and Other Important Questions (Nice Books, 1999)
Ariel (Educational Printing Services Ltd, 2000)
Call the Teacher Lazy (Educational Printing Services Ltd, 2000)
Every Dog Has His Day (Educational Printing Services, 2001)Catmare (Educational Printing Services Ltd, 2001)
The Early Word (Early Years Learning Methods) (Questions Publishing, 2002)