Our first year as Oxford’s pedal-powered lending library of poetry has flown by! Celebrate 12 months of browsing, borrowing, reading, rhyming, and writing with us at East Oxford Community Centre from 8pm on May 11. We will have an OPEN MIC SESSION so do bring along any work you’d like to share – your own or someone else’s who you admire – and sign up on the door. We will have POETIC GAMES so bring your creative joy and imagination.
We will also have readings from a range of writers to celebrate the diverse poetic voices in our city:
Nancy Campbell’s books include Disko Bay (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016) and How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic (winner of the Birgit Skiöld Award), and her memoir The Library of Ice, is forthcoming from Scribner this autumn. Nancy is the current Canal Laureate.
Mbalenhle Matandela
Mbalenhle Matandela is a Black radical feminist activist, poet and storyteller currently studying for her MSc Candidate in African Studies at the University of Oxford. Her activism and research interests include issues around race and resistance, gender, feminist education, militarism and sexual and reproductive health rights. Some of her poetry can be found in the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism.
Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, Shara’s awards include the Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Shara was the inaugural Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. She is the co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice and lives in Oxford.
We will also have a musical interlude from the incredibly talented Rosie Caldecott and Laura Theis.
You won’t want to miss this celebration! See you there…
