Thank you for your interest in joining our second Emma Press Birmingham Editorial Readers Group! There are two parts to this application. 

In Part 1, we ask you to respond to three questions. We hope to form a group with a range of different reading interests and motivations, and your answers will enable us to do this. 

Part 2 is an Equality Monitoring form. Please download a copy here, fill it in and upload as an attachment later in the application form. This is to help us ensure we fulfil our goal to make publishing more accessible to under-represented groups. 

There are limited opportunities for jobs and training in publishing in Birmingham and the West Midlands, and - in the wider industry - there is under-representation of Black and Asian people, people from other minority ethnic groups and low-income backgrounds, neurodiverse and disabled people. We hope this project will help address those imbalances and we are passionate about increasing the diversity of perspectives in the publishing industry. We ask for this equality data to ensure we recruit a diverse range of people to the group. The questions are in line with those asked by our funders Arts Council England and forms will be deleted following the selection process.

Membership of the group is reserved for residents of Birmingham and the West Midlands. We are defining this as having home postcodes with the following prefixes: B, CV, DY, WR, WS, WV

Attendance will be required at 6 sessions - 3 online and 3 in Birmingham - across September 2025 - March 2026 (dates & times TBC based on group availability). A payment of £25/session will be offered to support group members to attend.

Find out more about what the Birmingham Editorial Readers Group will do. 

Discover our first BERG cohort.