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Centre for Poetry and Poetics in Collaboration with Black Humanities Series Presents:

A Reading With Safia Khan, Inua Ellams and Imtiaz Dharker

Venue: The Diamond, LT2, The University of Sheffield, 6pm.

Safia Khan is a junior doctor and poet. Her debut collection (Too Much Mirch) was published in 2022 with Smith | Doorstop and won the New Poets Prize. She has been commissioned to write and deliver lectures in poetry for various universities and literary organisations, including The British Library, The University of Oxford, The Poetry Business, and the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine. Her work has been published in various journals and anthologies including The North, BATH MAGG, Poetry Wales, Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets (New Poets List), We’re All in It Together: Poems for a disUnited Kingdom (Grist), Dear Life (Hive), Surfing the Twilight (Hive). -- Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer. He is a Complete Works poet alumni and facilitates workshops in creative writing where he explores reoccurring themes in his work - Identity, Displacement and Destiny - in accessible, enjoyable ways for participants of all ages and backgrounds.

His awards include: Edinburgh Fringe First Award 2009, The Liberty Human Rights Award, The Live Canon International Poetry Prize, The Kent & Sussex Poetry Competition, Magma Poetry Competition, Winchester Poetry Prize, A Black British Theatre Award and The Hay Festival Medal for Poetry. He has been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, Tate Modern, Louis Vuitton, BBC Radio & Television. His poetry books include ‘Candy Coated Unicorn and Converse All Stars’ published Flipped Eye, 'The Wire-Headed Heathen' by Akashic Books, The Half God of Rainfall by 4th Estate and The Actual by Penned in The Margins. His plays include ‘Black T-shirt Collection’, ‘The 14th Tale’, ‘Barber Shop Chronicles’ and ‘Three Sisters’ published by Oberon. He founded The Midnight Run (an arts-filled, night-time, urban walking experience.) The Rhythm and Poetry Party (The R.A.P Party) which celebrates poetry & hip hop, and Poetry + Film / Hack (P+F/H) which celebrates Poetry & Film. -- Imtiaz Dharker grew up a 'Muslim Calvinist' in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. She is an accomplished artist and video film-maker, and has published six books with Bloodaxe, Postcards from god (including Purdah) (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001), The terrorist at my table (2006), Leaving Fingerprints (2009), Over the Moon (2014) and Luck Is the Hook (2018). Her seventh, Shadow Reader, is published in 2024. All her poetry collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of the books; she is one of very few poet-artists to work in this way. She was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2014, presented to her by The Queen in spring 2015, and has also received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Over the Moon was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2014. Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English syllabus, and she reads with other poets at Poetry Live! events all over the country to more than 35,000 students a year. She has had a dozen solo exhibitions of drawings in India, London, Leeds, New York and Hong Kong. She scripts and directs films, many of them for non-government organisations in India, working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children. In 2015 she appeared on the iconic BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs. In 2020 she was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University. She lives in London.

Please note this is an in-person event and we would love you to be there but if you can't make it to Sheffield you can log in by no later then 5.50 on the following link: meet.google.com/fdh-igyk-hrr

[cppsheffield]

The editors are pleased to announce the launch of issue 20 of the University of Sheffield's creative writing journal, The Sheffield Review, featuring work by students and staff in prose, poetry, art, hybrid and creative non-fiction on the theme Obsession & Perception. If you enjoy what you read, do please share with friends!

[cppsheffield]

23rd of May

The Diamond, LT2

5pm

The Sheffield Review is the University of Sheffield’s creative writing magazine and this year was the theme of Obsession & Perception.

This event is the launch of Issue 20 with a variety of works in poetry, prose, hybrid, translation and non-fiction published, each dipping into strange states of consciousness, gothic and feverish obsessiveness; this issue represents a selection of texts that dwell on the weird relations between what the senses experience and how the mind processes the world, mixing memory and desire.

Come along to a series of readings by the writers and to celebrate the launch of this issue with us in May.

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Call for Submissions / The SHEFFIELD REVIEW

Writers!

Call for submissions (is open now) for The Sheffield Review (formerly known as Route 57) - calling all University of Sheffield studens, staff, alumni and all sorts of affiliates:

“OBSESSION & PERCEPTION”

Issue 20

Call for submissions

The issue is open to writers and artists from or affiliated to the University of Sheffield. Deadline for submissions Friday 26th April, and we hope to launch mid-May.

Please read the guideline and eligibility carefully.

For further details, see below:

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Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents:

SIMON PERRIL · PETER ROBINSON · FRANCES PRESLEY · SIMON SMITH

24th of April – 6.30pm: Diamond, LT2

This event is free; students, staff and public, all warmly welcome.

Simon Perril is a poet and collagist. His poetry publications include Two Duets with Occasion (Shearsman 2024), The Slip (Shearsman, 2020), In the Final Year of my 40s (Shearsman, 2018), Beneath (Shearsman, 2015) Archilochus on the Moon (Shearsman, 2013), Newton’s Splinter (Open House, 2012), Nitrate (Salt, 2010), A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher, 2009), and Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing (Salt, 2004). His poetics essay ‘Good to Think with: My Surrealism’, along with collages and poetry, have just appeared in Shuddhashar FreeVoice 37: https://shuddhashar.com/good-to-think-with-my-surrealism/

As a critic he has written widely on contemporary poetry, editing The Salt Companion to John James, and Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling. His article ‘On Metis: Or, what the Squid and the Octopus taught me about Practice Research’, appeared in Writing In Practice 7, 2021. He is Professor of Poetic Practice at De Montfort University, in Leicester. You can see Simon give an online reading/talk with accompanying visuals here: youtube.com/watch?v=bJoI30MzLGs

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Peter Robinson has published various books of aphorisms, fiction, and literary criticism. For some of his poetry volumes and translations he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His most recent collection of poems is Retrieved Attachments (Two Rivers Press) and The Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani (translated with Roberta Antognini) published in New York by Agincourt Press. Return to Sendai: New & Selected Poems is due from MadHat Press in the USA in September 2024.

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Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire, of Dutch-Javanese and English parents, in 1952. She grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset, and lives in London. She studied modern literature at the universities of East Anglia and Sussex. She worked as an information specialist in community development, and at the Poetry Library. She collaborated with artist Irma Irsara on a project about women’s clothing and the fashion trade, Automatic Cross Stitch (Other Press, 2000); and with poet Elizabeth James in Neither the One nor the Other (Form Books, 1999). The title sequence of Paravane: new and selected poems, 1996-2003 (Salt, 2004) was a response to 9/11 and IRA bombsites in London. Lines of Sight (Shearsman 2009) focuses on Exmoor’s Neolithic stone sites, which also feature in a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading, Stone Settings (Odyssey, 2010). An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt, exploits the lexical and visual possibilities of an alphabet for girls (Five Seasons, 2012). Halse for hazel (Shearsman, 2014) initiates a new poetic syntax of marginal trees and languages, continued in Sallow, (Leafe Press, 2016), with images by Irma Irsara. Ada Unseen (Shearsman, 2019) concerns Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, mathematician and computer visionary, who lived on Exmoor. It was also a collaboration with Tilla Brading, ADADADA (Odyssey, 2022). Collected Poems 1973-2020 was published in two volumes by Shearsman in 2022.

Black Fens Viral (2020-) is written on a slow train through East Anglia’s flat, agricultural, landscape of black peat, once marshland. ‘Viral’ refers both to Covid and to a text generator known as the Markov chain, and its strange rearrangement of text resembles a viral assault. The first part of Black Fens Viral was published as a Literary Pocket Book (2021) by Steven Hitchins.

Presley has written various essays and reviews, especially on innovative British women poets. She has co-translated the work of two Norwegian poets, Hanne Bramness and Lars Amund Vaage. Her work is in the anthologies Infinite Difference (Shearsman, 2010), Ground Aslant: radical landscape poetry (Shearsman, 2011), Out of Everywhere2 (Reality Street, 2015), Fractured Ecologies (EyeCorner, 2020) and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Dispatches, 2021). She has contributed to a collection of poetic autobiographies, Cusp (Shearsman, 2012) and its London based companion volume, Clasp (Shearsman, 2015).

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Simon Smith is a poet and translator living in London. He has previously published ten collections of poetry including a selected poems and a complete Catullus translation. His latest books are Last Morning (Parlor Press, U.S.A.) and Municipal Love Poems (Shearsman Books, U.K.) both appeared as companion volumes in 2022. 2022 also saw the publication of Source (Muscaliet Press), a collaboration with artist Felicity Allen and representation of Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’. He is presently working on a book-length series of prose poems, The Magic Lantern Slides. Between 1991 and 2007 he worked at the Poetry Library in London and taught creative writing and poetry at London South Bank University, The Open University, and the University of Kent from 2006 to 2022. He is Emeritus Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/.../centre-poetry-and-poetics...

recording available now:

https://youtu.be/c-pP5Avt6Zw

[cppsheffield]

Recording of last night's readings with Ghazal Mosadeq and Pamenar Press, J. R. Carpenter, Safaa Fathy and Fran Lock is available now. Enjoy the dive.

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14th of March – 6.30pm: Diamond, University of Sheffield, Lecture Theatre 2.

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, in collaboration with Black Humanities Series, Presents: FRAN LOCK · SAFAA FATHY · J. R. CARPENTER · GHAZAL MOSADEQ & Pamenar Press

Please note this is an in-person event but we will be running a livestream for those unable to attend in person, please log in by no later than 6.30pm: meet.google.com/bht-tzds-guy

Books will be on sale; payment by cash (preferred).

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Ghazal Mosadeq is a poet, editor and translator. She is the founder of Pamenar Press, an independent publisher of poetry, translation, hybrid and critical writing. Her own work has been published by gammm Press, Tamaas, Litmus Press, Firmament and Blackbox Manifold among others. She is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, researcher, and Lecturer at University of Leeds. Her work asks questions about place, displacement, migration, colonialism, and climate across performance, print, and digital media. Her hybrid print-digital project This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2020 and featured in the the Digital Storytelling exhibition at the British Library 2023. Her most recent collection Le plaisir de la côte / The Pleasure of the Coast was published by Pamenar Press in 2023. https://luckysoap.com

Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and thirteen poetry collections, most recently 'a disgusting lie': further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval Bestiary. A collection of hybrid essays based on her research, titled Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects was published by Out-Spoken Press late last year. Fran is a Commissioning Editor and maid of all work at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters. She hates the Tories and all who sail in them. She lives in Kent.

Safaa Fathy was born in Egypt. She is a poet, essay writer and filmmaker. She had her PhD form the Sorbonne University and has been director of programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. Her plays Terror and Ordeal were prefaced by Jacques Derrida, with whom she signed a book, Tourner les mots (partly translated into English by Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania). Her book of poetry Revolution Goes Through Walls (SplitLevel Texts) was first published in Egypt, then in France, and in Brazil. Safaa Fathy’s experimental book of poems entitled Al Haschische is published by Pamenar s Press (London, directed by Ghazal Mosadeq2023). Where not to be Born, 2024 is published by Litumus Press NY. Safaa Fathy’s Name to the Sea, a film poem structured within a still frame, is being published along with the text in seven languages (Vanilla planifolia, Mexico City). Safaa Fathy has been writing a novel in English for the past five years.

The reading will be followed by a conversation with Pamenar Press, its editor, Ghazal Mosadeq and its writers run by Agnes Lehoczky.

Please note this is a free event (students, staff and public); all warmly welcome. There will be Pamenar books on sale before, during and after the readings.

Also see on:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/.../cente-for-poetry-and...

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/centre.../events/pamenar-press

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Centre for Poetry and Poetics presents: Angelina D'Roza, Gareth Gavin and Helen Mort. All warmly welcome.

28th of Feb, The Diamond, LT2, 6.30pm.

Angelina D'Roza lives in Sheffield. She was a writing mentor with the Koestler Trust and writer in residence at Bank Street Arts, collaborating with artists, writers, photographers. Most recently her work appears in Blackbox Manifold and Shearsman Press. Her debut collection Envies the Birds was published by Longbarrow Press in 2016. The Blue Hour is Angelina's new collection and was released by Longbarrow at the end of 2023.

H. Gareth Gavin is the author of Never Was: A Novel Without A World (Cipher Press, 2023), which has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and of Midland (Penned in the Margins, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. His short story, 'Home Death', was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. He is also interested in writing that moves between the creative and the critical, has written a monograph on free indirect style, and currently teaches a course on trans studies. He was born in Birmingham and lives in Manchester, where he works in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield and grew up in Chesterfield. She is the author of three poetry collections with Chatto & Windus. Her most recent, ‘The Illustrated Woman’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2022. She has also published a novel and a non-fiction book ‘A Line Above The Sky’ about motherhood and mountaineering. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The readings will be followed by some social mingling time with the writers, an opportunity to talk to the three poets, buy books - Longbarrow Press with have a small book stall, ask questions and so on....

Event Link

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/.../centre-for-poetry-and...

Recordings available now:

Part 1

Part 2

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The Apparition Conglomerate – so dubbed- are a group of current PhD Creative Writing Students from the University of Sheffield. Their work spans from the poetic and the experimental to more traditional forms of fiction. No genre or creative space is left untouched or unexamined, and you will see that tonight. Its members are all entrenched within the writing community, and in various stages of their writing careers. On the night we will be hearing from: AJ Moore, Beverly Thomas, Leonie Martin, Catherine Greenwood, Ella Ruby Self, Llew Watkins, Megan Meredith, Mark Hackett and Heather Beier.

7th of February, The Diamond, LT7, 6.30pm.

Also see on:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/.../centre-for-poetry-and...

Recording available now:

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[cppsheffield]

Tuesday 12th December 2023

Diamond LT2, 17:30-19:00

On December 12th, 1979 NATO with its Double-Track Decision opted to deploy more medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles in Western Europe. in June 1980, RAF Greenham Common was selected as the main British base for the United States Air Force's nuclear armed Cruise Missiles. Some missiles were deployed at RAF Molesworth but the majority of the missiles were deployed at RAF Greenham Common.

A Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was established in protest at the deployment of cruise missiles in 1981, and the camp lasted 19 years. The most famous actions of the Peace Camp were the Embrace the Base / Reflect the Base actions where thousands of women held hands and encircled the base on December 12th in 1982 and 1983 – 50,000 women in 1983! The date was chosen as a protest anniversary remembering and condemning the Double-Track Decision. This year is the 40th anniversary of the 12th December Reflect the Base actions at the camp in 1983.

         We will be celebrating the Peace Camp with a series of readings of the protest poetry written by the women at the camp and by feminist poets in the 1980s. We welcome one of the most powerful voices of that decade, the incomparable poet Geraldine Monk. Alongside her will be the activist-artist Michael Sanders who will be talking about his Molesworth and Greenham Common work. Students, staff and writers will be reading a selection of the protest and feminist poems of the early 1980s written at the camp or inspired by it, introduced by PhD researcher Isobel Cook. 

All are welcome to this free evening of Greenham Common poetry.

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Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents a reading with Allen Fisher and Kelvin Corcoran

9TH OF NOVEMBER 2023 – 6.30pm: Diamond, LT2

Poet, painter, and art historian Allen Fisher has over 160 single-author publications, with his two most recent artist’s books Black Pond (2020) and proceeds in the garden, after Dante’s Paradiso. Fisher worked in the City Lead Works from 1962 until the ’70s, performed with Fluxus in Britain in the ’70s, and studied physics, human physiology, drawing and color, and art history at Goldsmiths and Essex. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and editor of the journal Spanner and Spanner Editions and co-publisher of Aloes Books, New London Pride, and Edible Magazine.

Kelvin Corcoran grew up in the English Midlands the son of an alcoholic Irish father and loving mother. As a child he benefited from free school milk and the family allowance, which was essential. By virtue of a good teacher, he went to university and read poetry. His first book was published in 1985. He was a teacher for 33 years and then for a while a voluntary worker in the NHS. After the discovery of poetry, the second great change in his life was meeting his wife, Melanie. His work belongs to no school and has been consistently praised for its lyricism and intelligence, commended by the Poetry Society and the Forward Prize committee and commissioned by the Arts Council and Medicine Unboxed. He lives in Brussels, Greece and Penwith in Cornwall.

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Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents: CLARE FISHER · GARETH GAVIN · ROSIE ŠNAJDR

22ND OF NOVEMBER 6.30pm – Diamond, LT2

Clare Fisher is a fiction writer and creative writing lecturer. Her debut novel, All the Good Things (Viking, Penguin, 2017) won a Betty Trask award and was described by the Guardian as ‘a sparky and unsettling debut.’ Her short story collection, How the Light Gets In (Influx Press, 2018) was longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story prize and the International Dylan Thomas prize. Her most recent short story collection, The Moon is Trending has just been published by Salt.

H. Gareth Gavin is the author of Never Was: A Novel Without A World (Cipher Press, 2023), which has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and of Midland (Penned in the Margins, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. His short story, 'Home Death', was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. He is also interested in writing that moves between the creative and the critical, has written a monograph on free indirect style, and currently teaches a course on trans studies. He was born in Birmingham and lives in Manchester, where he works in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Rosie Šnajdr writes experimental short fiction. She has written two short stories collections—A Hypocritical Reader (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018) and Whorl the Prudident Slipt (Veer, 2021)—and is currently working on a mosaic novel of stories and fragments called Telepathic Greenland Shark. She co-edits The Cambridge Literary Review and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.

More info about us:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/.../centre-for-poetry-and...

Recording now available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJVdapPbRWY

[cppsheffield]

Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents a reading with Allen Fisher and Kelvin Corcoran

Poet, painter, and art historian Allen Fisher has over 160 single-author publications, with his two most recent artist’s books Black Pond (2020) and proceeds in the garden, after Dante’s Paradiso. Fisher worked in the City Lead Works from 1962 until the ’70s, performed with Fluxus in Britain in the ’70s, and studied physics, human physiology, drawing and color, and art history at Goldsmiths and Essex. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and editor of the journal Spanner and Spanner Editions and co-publisher of Aloes Books, New London Pride, and Edible Magazine.

Kelvin Corcoran grew up in the English Midlands the son of an alcoholic Irish father and loving mother. As a child he benefited from free school milk and the family allowance, which was essential. By virtue of a good teacher, he went to university and read poetry. His first book was published in 1985. He was a teacher for 33 years and then for a while a voluntary worker in the NHS. After the discovery of poetry, the second great change in his life was meeting his wife, Melanie. His work belongs to no school and has been consistently praised for its lyricism and intelligence, commended by the Poetry Society and the Forward Prize committee and commissioned by the Arts Council and Medicine Unboxed. He lives in Brussels, Greece and Penwith in Cornwall.

Kelvin will be reading from Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2023). Kelvin writes in his afterword to the Collected:

'The poems collected here were written and published between 1985 through to 2023. Almost all of this poetry was written in sequences or entire books rather than as separate poems. I’ve aimed to keep that feature with some trimming. I’ve excluded some early work in order to avoid repetition, and omitted the books written with the late Alan Halsey, precisely because they are collaborations and not my work alone. One day I would like to collect all those books in one volume in order to restate the lasting pleasure of having worked with Alan. In compiling these poems I’ve kept in mind Jane Harrison’s remarks in Epilegomena To The Study Of Greek Religion, that all poetry is about praise or blame, celebration or satire. I don’t exclude myself from this second category and I can be fairly selective about what fits in the first. I hope there is plenty of both qualities here.'

https://www.shearsman.com/.../Kelvin-Corcoran-Collected...

(Collected Poems, back cover headlines):

“Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller’s gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song. . . Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness.” David Wevill.

“Corcoran is a superbly skilled lyricist.” Frances Leviston, The Guardian.

“Kelvin Corcoran has allied a strikingly individual intelligence to a genuinely musical sensibility.” Don Paterson, The Observer.

“The ‘straight music’ of the English lyrical tradition drives these poems that are honed, hard, elegant and economic. Then, suddenly, brilliance flashes out against the grain, in the flaws. It is ‘the ripped voice makes us free’.” Rosmarie Waldrop.

“Corcoran is at the front of contemporary poetry: the lyric grace of his language is threaded with an historical perspective that raises the poetry far beyond the world of a localised present.” Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence.

“Kelvin Corcoran’s recent work inhabits the imagination as a distinct sphere of abundance, drawn from reality as a celebration of the true scope of the mind. And the instrument of this is a written eloquence which takes in the past of poetry and of the spirit as a freshly lived condition.” Peter Riley, PN Review.

“Kelvin Corcoran is a writer for whom politics and poetics are inseparable; his work demonstrates an exhilarating truth, that wit and irony need not exclude passion and trust in the pursuit of poetry.” Ken Edwards, The New British Poetry.

9TH OF NOVEMBER – 6.30pm: Diamond, LT2

https://www.eventbrite.com/.../centre-for-poetry-and...

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Off the Shelf in collaboration with the Centre for Poetry and Poetics: European Poetry: Lutz Seiler and Volker Sielaff in conversation with Professor Adam Piette and Stefan Tobler

Fri 13 October 2023 , 12:30pm-1:30pm

Millennium Gallery

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Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield as its first reading into the Autumn 2023 Series presents: a reading with CUT COLLECTIVE; a collective of writers of poetry, prose, hybrid and experimental texts. We will hear readings by Mark Lindsey, Ethel Maqeda, Amber Whitham and AJ Moore. The four readings will be preceded by short readings from some of our fresh MA in Creative Writing Sheffield graduates: Heather Beier, Harley Riley, Milly Winston-Jacques and Mina Miller.

Mark Lindsey was awarded his MA in Creative Writing from the University of Sheffield and is currently working on his first full collection of experimental, hybrid poetry. His writing uses prose, poetry, poetic essays and collage to explore issues of fiction and truth, politics, history, misogyny, psychology and trauma. His research includes explorations of grief, the importance of the physical and its relation to truth in poetry and non-fiction and use of erasure as a method of exposure in the works of contemporary women poets. His work has been published by “independent, cross-cultural, multi-lingual experimental publisher” Pamenar Press and in print and online editions of the University of Sheffield’s creative writing journal Route 57. His first book NEXT TO NOTHING and THIS WAS MEANT TO BE A STORY was published by Beir Bua Press and is a winner of the 2021 Laurence Sterne Prize and was nominated for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2023.

Amber V Whitham’s writing is often concerned with the relationships and parallels between animal, plant, and human bodies, intertwined with Dadaist concepts of consciousness, illness, trauma and the corporeal condition. Her work consists of hybrid writing which ranges from narrative prose to traditional verse; often blending the two to emulate a stream of consciousness that is both physically and metaphorically represented on the page.; symbolising the erosion that trauma has upon both the body and mind and how mental and physical illness might affect the natural world. She completed both her BA in English Literature and her MA in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield, where her research focused on modern women’s poetry and its treatment of illness. Having had her work featured in Route57, Amber is currently working full-time as a copywriter, whilst writing in her spare time and working on her newest collection.

Ethel Maqeda is a Sheffield-based Zimbabwean British writer and graduate of the University of Sheffield’s MA Creative Writing program. With a passion for foregrounding unheard narratives, her work draws inspiration from African women’s experiences, at home and in the diaspora. She uses prose fiction and non-fiction to explore issues of home, black womanhood, African women’s struggles, and triumphs over experiences of racism, colonialism and global exploitation. She is currently writing a creative non-fiction collection exploring Southern African women’s practice of Ubuntu in the diaspora. Ethel’s stories have appeared in various journals, including Short Fiction: The Visual Literary Journal, Isele Magazine, Wasafiri Magazine, and the University of Sheffield’s creative writing journal Route 57) and in anthologies, Volume-3 (Palm-Sized Press), We are not Shadows (Folkways Press), Wretched Strangers (Boiler House) and Verse Matters (Valley Press).

A J Moore is a Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, researching the archive, intertextuality and identity. Work in Route 57, Blackbox Manifold, D.O.R (LJMcD Communications), Eyeland (c22 Press), For The Love Of, Beir Bua Journal and The Babel Tower Noticeboard. Chapbooks M(P)atriarchive (Beir Bua Press) and Zeitgeist (c22 Press).

Twitter: @AJMoore_70.

Further info:

Futher info on the collective: https://www.cutcollectivewriters.org/