Wouldn't you like your books to be Earth-positive too?

Then talk to DIRT Editor, Alice Willitts, who is keen to help publishers and poets who would like to trial Earth-positive publishing. Did you know you can go wilder and bolder than FSC approved paper and cutting back on packaging?!

• Email ONE TO ONE to DIRT@dialect.org.uk to set up a one to one meeting.
• Email GROUP to DIRT@dialect.org.uk to express interest in meeting up with others.
• Join Alice's mailing list to keep up to date with the project. Join the mailing list

Alice also offers mentoring and editing services to collaborating poets, please contact her for more details.

Focus for 2027

• engage other presses in printing on brown paper as a visible demonstration of intent to change how we print poetry in the UK
• set up a small research group to do the next stage of research into publishing options for bigger presses: take the DIRT model from test case to proven possibility

If you'd like to join the research team, please get in touch DIRT@dialect.org.uk 

About DIRT Plantable Poetry

Poets Alice Willitts and JLM Morton teamed up to release DIRT: plantable poetry collaborations that literally go back into the earth.

DIRT commissions pairs of poets to write collaborative poems in response to climate science, and models Earth-positive publishing. Previous commissions include poets Clare Pollard paired with Anglia Ruskin student Freya Sacksen, and Alycia Pirmohamed paired with Hannah Copley, Linda France with Rona Luo, Nasim Luczaj with Morag Anderson, Kara Barlow with Karen Downs-Barton.

To our delight, DIRT is shortlisted for the Michael Marks publisher award 2026!

Why is planting poems a good idea? Following in the footsteps of artists who make work that vanishes back into the place it came from, Alice wanted to send exceptional poems back into the Earth the poets are writing about.

We wondered if anyone would be interested in our experimental, plantable poetry. We decided to launch the idea with a crowd funder because we hoped it was a great way to find support and maybe start a community that would be interested in the project longterm.

Thanks to that amazing crowd-sourced support, we were able to research earth-positive publishing and run a prototype collaboration. DIRT is printed with vegetable inks on untreated, compostable paper accompanied by seeds collected from the city-pollinators project Alice co-founded, On The Verge Cambridge. Once planted, the seeds soak up more carbon than is used to post the publications out, which takes DIRT from carbon-neutral to earth-positive publications. - Alice Willitts

Ephemeral and brilliant, this plantable poetry idea chimes with other projects like Future Library where the books are written now but will only be printed once the trees needed for the paper have grown in a hundred years time.

DIRT’s editor, Alice Willitts, also co-directed the Seeds in the DIRT Imaginarium, a forward-thinking project funded with £10k from the Sustainable Futures Fund from Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute.

Once upon a time... I had an idea for gathering together writers to collectively redesign the publishing of our poems and stories… create fabulous, weirder, queerer, boundary-crossing, collaborative thinking… and remove the carbon footprint of the publishing industry from toxic to earth-positive. ~ Alice Willitts

Buy a copy:

Hertz by Hannah Copley & Alycia Pirmohamed

Loops by Clare Pollard & Freya Sacksen

June 2026, we run our first DIRT Plantable Poetry Competition for Collaboration.

We invited poets who care deeply about our living planet and want to experience writing in collaboration with another poet to submit work for our first DIRT plantable poetry competition pamphlet. The response was resounding and we have had the delight of pairing six winning poets to write in collaboration.