Poetry Festival: Long Song for Summer II

Sarona Abuaker is a poet, artist, and educational outreach worker. Her poems have been published in Berfrois, MAP Magazine, and the 87press’ Digital Poetics series. Her mixed-media essay Suture Fragmentations – A Note on Return was published in December 2020 with KOHL: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. She is based in London. Why so few women on the street at night is her debut collection (the87press, 2021).

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His second collection, After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, was longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held residencies internationally in the US, Brazil, and the V&A Museum. Her debut poetry collection, QUIET, winner of the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, is published by Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf.

Danny Hayward has published books of poetry with Materials, Veer, Shit Valley and others. His writing has been translated into French and Serbian, and his critical writing has been published by Art Forum and Commune. Recently his work has been included as a part of the ‘Illiberal Arts’ exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and a volume of his essays on poetry will be published in autumn 2021 by Punctum Press. He maintains the out-of-print poetry pdf archive Free Trials.

Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and eleven poetry collections, most recently White/ Other (87 Press, 2022), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Fran is the out-going Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval Bestiary. A collection of essays relating to dirty animality, queer failure, and trash-feminist practice, Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, will be published by Out-Spoken Press later this year. A collection of poems inspired by the Cambridge University Library and Parker Library bestiaries, The Dire Hyena’s Knot, will be published by the 87 Press in 2024. Fran’s other work includes the chapbook Forever Alive (Dare-Gale Press, 2022), and the critically acclaimed collection Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (Pamenar Press, 2021). A further collection with Pamenar, ‘a disgusting lie’ (further adventures through the neoliberal hell mouth) is due later this year. Fran is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters, where she most recently edited the mammoth anthology The Cry of the Poor (2021). She is a member of the new
Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. She is the co-host of the cross-cultural poetry podcast Social Yet Distanced, and she is currently working on a poetic riff on the Unabomber Manifesto, worryingly entitled Industrial Society and its Future (The Musical).

Dr Golnoosh Nour is the author of The Ministry of Guidance and Other Stories (2020) and Rocksong (2021), both shortlisted for the Polari Prize. Golnoosh’s poetry pamphlet Impure Thoughts came out with Verve Poetry Press in 2022. She’s performed her work in literature festivals and events across the UK and internationally. Her work has also been published by Granta, Vintage, and Columbia Journal. Golnoosh teaches Creative Writing at the University of Reading.

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water, and she currently teaches Creative writing at the University of Cambridge. Alycia received her MFA from the University of Oregon and her PhD from the University of Edinburgh. She is the recipient of the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

Verity Spott is a poet from Brighton. Verity is the author of several books including Hopelessness (the 87 Press), Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband Books), We Will Bury You (Veer Books) and Poems of Sappho (in translation, Face Press). From 2018 to 2019 Verity was Poet in Residence at the University of Surrey. Verity teaches poetry in Brighton with The Creative Writing Programme and (alongside Kat Addis) with the Hollingdean Wednesdays project where they hold a poetry reading and writing group in Hollingdean Community Centre. Verity’s poems have been translated into Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and German and their book Hopelessness has been translated into French and published by Même pas l’hiver. Verity plays cello in the improvised tune duo Benzo Fury and the free jazz trio In Threads. Since 2006 Verity has run the monthly poetry, performance and music event Horseplay.

Lord Tusk is a master producer, sound curator and connoisseur of unplayed and eclectic Audio Waves.

A Lover of G notes and the 1
Loyal to the P

(Sub Merchants)

Organised by F(r)ictions.