Deborah Alma

Deborah Alma is a UK poet, editor and bookseller. She has worked using poetry with people in need and taught at both Worcester and Keele Universities. From 2012, she has been the Emergency Poet, offering poetry on prescription from her vintage amblance. She co-founded the world’s first walk-in Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire with her partner, the poet James Sheard, in 2019, which now has a second branch inside Lush Spa Oxford Street, London.

She is editor of Emergency Poet, an anti-stress poetry anthology; #Me Too, which rallies against sexual harassment; a women’s poetry anthology, Ten Poems of Happiness from Candlestick Press and co-edited with Dr Katie Amiel These Are the Hands – Poems from the Heart of the NHS. She is also editor of National Trust: Nature Poems. Her first full collection Dirty Laundry is published by Nine Arches Press.

She is co-author of The Poetry Business School with Mark Constantine and is editor of the Poetry Pharmacy series with Macmillan, in 2025.