Centre for Poetry and Poetics

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, proudly presents:

A Reading with Camilla Nelson and Rhys Trimble

Time: 21st of May, 2026 6pm Diamond, LT2 University of Sheffield

Camilla A Nelson is an interdisciplinary artist & poet, small press publisher, creative programmer and freelance academic currently formulating her ideas into an "Experimental Ecology of Line". Camilla has a PhD in Performance Writing from Falmouth University/Dartington College of Arts (2012). Her work expands page-based poetry into mark-making, soundwork, installation and performance. She is founding editor of Singing Apple Press, a Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University and member of the PLACE Collective. Camilla has published three poetry collections with Knives Forks & Spoons, Contraband Books and Guillemot Press. Her fourth, A Mending Piece (in four parts), will be published by KFS later this year.

Rhys Trimble was born in Zambia in 1977. He is a bilingual poet, text artist, performer, drummer, editor, critic, collaborator, shaman, staff-wielder and shoutyman based in Wales. The author of more than a dozen books, including his latest, Swansea Automatic, he is interested in avant-garde poetry and Welsh metrics.

Please note, this is an in-person event but you can log on to this link by no later than 17.55pm on the night: meet.google.com/uyg-rmtk-hpx

Event curated by agnes lehoczky & CP&P, sheffield.

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, Presents:

THREE BOOK LAUNCHES

by

NANCY GAFFIELD ADAM PIETTE ANSGAR ALLEN

29th of April, 6.30pm, DIAMOND, LT3 , University of Sheffield

Nancy Gaffield is an Emeritus Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her first collection of poetry, Tokaido Road (CB editions 2011) was nominated for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and was awarded the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she completed a libretto for the opera, Tokaido Road: A Journey after Hiroshige (Shearsman 2014) for the composer Nicola Lefanu which premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival before touring nationally. Other publications include Continental Drift (Shearsman 2014), Meridian (Longbarrow 2019), and Wealden (Longbarrow 2021), a collaborative work of poems and music performed by The Drift. Her poems have appeared in leading journals and anthologies including The Forward Anthology, the Times Literary Supplement, Tears in the Fence, The Long Poem Magazine, Blackbox Manifold, Golden Handcuffs Review and Angel Exhaust (forthcoming). Destiny Manifest, published by Shearsman in 2026, is her sixth collection.

Ansgar Allen is the author of books including a short history of Cynicism, and the novels, Black Vellum, Plague Theatre, The Wake and the Manuscript and The Sick List. His fictions foreground "uncertainty, digression, fragmentation, and the impossibility of closure... His texts sidestep the expectation that philosophical discourse be coherent, linear, or authoritative. Instead, they teach through artful disintegration, ambiguous gestures, and the construction of ruin." He is editor-in-chief at Erratum Press, and co-founded Risking Education, an imprint of Punctum Books.

Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at Sheffield. He is the co-editor of the international contemporary poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett; Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. He edited the special issue of Translation and Literature on “Modernism and Translation”, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson with Katy Price (2007) and The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature with Mark Rawlinson (2012). His poetry collections are: nights as dreaming (Constitutional Information / earthbound press), CCCLXV with Crater Press (October 2025), and Lies Blurring Here with Broken Sleep (2026). He is the co-translator, with Ágnes Lehóczky, of The Song of the Cosmos: Selected Poems of Attila József (Shearsman Books, 2026). He is currently co-editing an edition of Australian poet Catherine Vidler’s work with Amelia Dale and A.J. Carruthers for Puncher & Wattman.

Born in Cornwall in 1947, Paul Rossiter has lived in Tokyo since 1981; he is Professor Emeritus in Language and Information Sciences at the University of Tokyo. After he retired from teaching in 2012, he founded Isobar Press to publish English-language poetry from Japan, both by English native-speaker poets with a strong connection to Japan and by Japanese poets who choose to write in English, together with English translations of modernist or contemporary Japanese poetry. The press has so far published fifty-six titles by thirty-five authors or translators. His poems have appeared in Tears in the Fence , Shearsman , Poetry Salzburg Review , Tokyo Poetry Journal , World Haiku , Golden Handcuffs Review , NOON: journal of the short poem , PN Review , Molly Bloom , and Otoliths . He has published ten volumes of poetry with Isobar, ranging from From the Japanese (2013) to The Pleasures of Peace (2021); his latest publication is his collected poems, Passages: Poems 1969–2019 (2024).

Note, this is an in person event but you can log on before 6.30 on:

meet.google.com/ubt-mdro-qde

Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents: A Reading: Wilson, Branfoot, Rowland and Linklater

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, Presents:

Susie Wilson Antony Rowland Tom Branfoot Jazmine Linklater

Half poet, half tutor, half clown, Susie Wilson is a Scottish auDHD writer living in Sheffield. She has published two pamphlets: Nowhere Near As Safe As A Snake In Bed (Verve, 2024), which won the Disabled Poets Prize Best Pamphlet 2024 and Skin the Rabbit (The Braag, 2025). She is now spending a year writing and recording long poems about the Don and the Spey rivers, including collaborating with musicians and other performers, funded by the Arts Council. She mentors, teaches for Writing East Midlands’ Beyond the Spectrum and facilitates Manchester Poetry Library’s Sub Club, now also monthly at Sheffield Central Library. She lives with advanced melanoma.

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Writers' Award in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023. His poem ‘A Parliament of Jets’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2025. Volatile, his debut collection,is forthcoming with The 87 Press. 

Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester where she is a regional editor for the online art writing platform Corridor8. Her new poetry pamphlet is Snagged on red thread with Monitor Books. She is currently undertaking practice-based research in art writing and ekphrastic encounters at Sheffield University. 

Antony Rowland has published four poetry collections: The Land of Green Ginger (Salt, 2008), I Am a Magenta Stick (Salt, 2012), M (Arc, 2017) and Caldebroc (Arc, 2023). Rowland received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2000, and he was awarded the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2012. He was invited to record work for the UK Poetry Archive in 2009, and the Lyrikline (Germany) in 2014. The Dutch government elected him as a UK poetry ‘ambassador’ for 2016: his poetry was read on national television and shown on screens at Schipol airport and Amsterdam Central Station.

Please note this is an in-person event but if you can't make it, you can log on by 6pm on: meet.google.com/dbx-icia-nbz

Event curated by ágnes lehóczky

CENTRE FOR POETRY AND POETICS PRESENTS:

THE (UN)EMPLOYED CREATIVE

A CREATIVE WRITING MASTER CLASS WITH HARLEY E. RYLEY

16TH OF DECEMBER 6-7.15pm

CENTRE FOR POETRY AND POETICS

THE DIAMOND, LT2

University of Sheffield

Armed with her 10-year career experience and not a single statistic to back up her claims, join Harley for this one-off talk exploring the paradoxical concept of the creative-employee and the sometime unanswerable question: what do I do with my creative writing degree? Part masterclass, part prose-poem, part meditation on employability in the (un)creative industries, Harley will bring her appropriately cynical and humorous take on her own career experiences, as well as prompts and questions for you to take away. She can’t give you the answers, but she can ask the right questions. There will be time for Q&A and broader discussion as part of the event.

Harley E. Ryley is a memoir writer, poet & accidental novelist. She is currently studying for her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Her thesis writes a radical new approach to memoir writing, both a feminist writing anti-handbook which unwrites traditional memoir structures and a meta-memoir exploring truth, memory and the bitter woman. Harley also uses her ‘proper job’ skills from her previous life as a Civil Servant in her freelance career, providing Business Development services to creative organisations and offering writing support services to aspiring writers.

All warmly welcome; students, staff, alumni, friends, Sheffield peeps and keen and curious eggs from all around the world.

This event is an in-person event but you can also log on - by no later than 5.50pm online: meet.google.com/egv-bppw-sdf

Also see more info on: https://sheffield.ac.uk/centre.../events/unemployed-creative

Hosted by Agi Lehoczky

recording now available:

CENTRE FOR POETRY AND POETICS, SHEFFIELD PRESENTS:

THE PARADISE COLLECTIVE

Readings by:

KYM MARTINDALE EMMA BOLLAND ADAM PIETTE HARRIET TARLO GERALDINE MONK TERRY O’CONNOR ÁGNES LEHÓCZKY

with a book launch and a conversation Creative Writing students featuring: Aisling Crook, Rufus Hall and Eloise Harrison

& A CHRISTMAS BOOK FAIR

15TH OF DECEMBER, MAPPIN HALL UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD 18.00PM start time

All warmly welcome: students, staff, alumni, Sheffield peeps and from beyond...

Kym Martindale taught English and Creative Writing at Falmouth University, Cornwall until 2019. Her academic work on the writers Monique Wittig, Frances Bellerby, Alice Oswald and Edward Thomas appears in journals and books such as Process, Landscape and Text, eds Adeline Johns-Putra and Catherine Brace, Rodopi (2010), and Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature, ed. Ana Maria Sanchez, Routledge (2013). In 2019, she returned happily to her native Yorkshire, and has since collaborated with Harriet Tarlo on Spillways (2022) and been published variously over the years in The Clearing, and other online journals.

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer whose methods include literatures, translation, screenwriting, performance, drawing, sculpture, installation, and moving image. Their creative monographs include Over, In, and Under (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019) and Instructions from Light (JOAN, 2023). Recent creative and critical contributions include ‘Speaking Silence’ in Gestures: a body of work (Manchester University Press, 2025), ‘Streaming Dreaming’ in A Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros (Terra Nova / MIT Press) and their text ‘Am / Thought / Always’ was included in Best British Short Stories 2021 (Salt Publishing). Their translation of Louis Delluc’s 1920 screenplay Le Silence is the first to be published in English. With Rachel Smith, they are co-editor of intergraphia, a small press who have published pamphlets by Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Sascha A. Akhtar, Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, Derek Beaulieu and more. They have exhibited and performed internationally and have work in public and private collections. Recent visual and performance works have been exhibited as part of Testing Ground, a solo two-month residency at Yorkshire ArtSpace (2025), Necrology at Haarlem Artspace (2025), Checked Out at Hypha Studios, The Bonecrushers Dream at Council Gallery (2025) and Another Way of Seeing at Leeds Art Gallery (2025). Their 2025 solo project The Public Dream at The Art House UK drew inspiration from The Art House’s historic building history as a library – a place of both illumination and imagination – using the main gallery as a live studio they developed a large-scale wall-drawing, a sculpture and light installation, and an experimental text exploring dreams, sci-fi, and speculative futures. The project was described as ‘a poetic, speculative environment that blurs the line between archive, dream, and imagination’.

Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at Sheffield. He is the co-editor of the international contemporary poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. He edited the special issue of Translation and Literature on “Modernism and Translation”, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson with Katy Price (2007) and The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature with Mark Rawlinson (2012). He is the co-editor of the international contemporary poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He has had poems published in Stand, Adjacent Pineapple and elsewhere, the broadside pamphlet nights as dreaming (Constitutional Information / earthbound press), CCCLXV with Crater Press (October 2025), and Lies Blurring Here with Broken Sleep (forthcoming April 2026). Also forthcoming in 2026 will be a co-translation of the work of Attila József with Ágnes Lehóczky, with Shearsman in 2026, and an edition of the work of Australian poet Catherine Vidler's work, co-edited with Amelia Dale and A.J. Carruthers, with Puncher & Wattman.

Ágnes Lehóczky’s poetry collections published in the UK are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box, 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box, 2012), Carillonneur (Shearsman, 2014), Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017), Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams & Lies (Crater Press, 2023) and Apropos Paradise Square (Pamenar Press, 2025). She also has three full poetry collections in Hungarian published in Budapest: Ikszedik stáció (Universitas, 2000), Medalion (Universitas, 2002) and Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló, 2015). She is the author of the academic monograph Poetry, the Geometry of Living Substance – comprising four essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy (2011). Her pamphlet Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters was published by Boiler House Press (2017). She co-edited major international anthologies: the Sheffield Anthology (Smith/Doorstop, 2012) with Adam Piette, The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley (Boiler House, 2018) with Zoë Skoulding, Wretched Strangers (Boiler House, 2018) with J. T. Welsch and most recently the ‘Monk Collective’ with Adam Piette (Blackbox Manifold, 2023). Fission of Being – Endnotes on Earthbound was commissioned by The Roberts Institute of Art, London in 2021. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics at the University of Sheffield. With Adam Piette she’s currently working on translations of Attila József (forthincoming by Shearsman in 2026) and István Vörös (forthcoming in 2026).

Harriet Tarlo’s poetry is published with Shearsman Press, Etruscan books and Guillemot Press. She collaborated for over ten years with the artist Judith Tucker, exhibiting widely here and abroad and publishing five artists’ books with Wild Pansy Press. Her most recent publications are Cut Flowers 1 & 2 (2021/2024); with Judith Tucker, Saltwort (2022) and with Kym Martindale, Spillways (2022). She edited the influential anthology The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011). She is a Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics at Sheffield Hallam University.

Geraldine Monk’s poetry was first published in the 1970’s with many collections to her name including her widely acclaimed Interregnum, Creation Books and Escafeld Hangings West House Books. Her most recent collection of poems They Who Saw the Deep was published in the USA by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. She is a founding member of the Sheffield antichoir Juxtavoices for which she wrote many pieces in collaboration with her late husband, the poet Alan Halsey and the musician Martin Archer. In 2019 she was commissioned to write the libretto Paradise Square for the Soft Rebellion film by Chloe Brown. She is an affiliated poet to The Centre for Poetry and Poetics, University of Sheffield.

Terry O’Connor is a core member and performer with Forced Entertainment, “Britain’s most brilliant experimental theatre company” (The Guardian), award-winners of the 2016 International Ibsen Prize for their original contribution to theatre. Her work as an artist and performer is also replayed through a long history of engagement as a lecturer, mentor and collaborator, recently focused on extending experimental practice in her work with young people on Forced Entertainment’s participation projects. In 2011, she became Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance Practice at the University of Sheffield. Her current doctoral research at the University of Salford (2019-25) investigates the functions and philosophies of improvised text within the postdramatic and the possibilities of the form in applied theatre contexts, working with young people and non-professional groups.

This is an in-person event but you can log on by no later than 17.50 via: meet.google.com/owp-fiyq-oym

Also see more info on: https://sheffield.ac.uk/centre.../events/paradise-collective

Recording now available:

The Sheffield Launch of 'Apropos Paradise Square' (Pamenar Press, 2025) - by Ágnes Lehóczky hosted by Harriet Tarlo

Old Post Office

Sheffield Hallam University

Weds 29 October at 5.30pm

Apropos – to the purpose, from propos "thing said in conversation, talk; purpose, plan” -here Agnes Lehoczky converses, talks, plans towards a poet’s consolation and thinks in the ‘blue zone’ about the materials of the worlds circling around her. Consolation is more than alleviation of grief, anxiety, distress – it is from Old French consolacion "solace, comfort; delight, pleasure". That is the ambition, the seeking of Elysium. There is no place to stop in that search, as we ‘tear through the world’ with our bodies, in this restless sparsely punctuated paragraph of a poem ‘remembering/disremembering’ touching past and present poet companions, girl companions – except perhaps in the images that arrest the text in moments of women’s solidarity in the public square, the small working rooms of poets or the rural stone settlements. ‘Solace, comfort; delight, pleasure" flicker in and out of the spaces Lehoczky builds, but, ultimately, they are all irredeemably haunted – Hades is a ruin, Elysium is uninhabited. Here are the workings - ‘by which I mean,’ ‘ by which I mean’ – the ‘where we are when we think.’ (Harriet Tarlo, for Apropos Paradise)

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield Presents:

MATTHEW CHEESEMAN, LOGAN COLLIGNON,

ÁGNES LEHÓCZKY & ADAM PIETTE

READINGS & THE LAUNCH OF:

Adam Piette: CCCLXV (Crater Press, October 2025)

Doors open:6.30pm, 6.45pm starting time.

Readers:

Matthew Cheeseman works across fiction, non-fiction and poetry, often collaborating with artists to create books and pamphlets. At the University of Derby he is Professor of Writing and Folklore. He runs a small press, Spirit Duplicator, is a Council member of The Folklore Society and a trustee of Bloc Projects, a contemporary art gallery in Sheffield. @sduplicator; @eine.

Logan Collignon is a writer, researcher and teacher working at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her work is indexed to critical theory, specifically psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and the more-than-human, and consists of a sustained and committed deconstruction of the so-called human that she performs in different contexts. She has published academic work on the technological unconscious of the American Cold War (Rocket States, Bloomsbury, 2014) and the insectile (The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human, Routledge, 2022) and is active in creative writing publications and other forms of ‘fugitive’ writing, including a pamphlet on the (former) Borussia Dortmund captain Marco Reus. She has been working on a critical-creative and cultural-historical investigation of narcissism titled Case Study of a Partially Dead Object, attentive to the discourses available and unavailable to speak about traumatic dailiness. She does not necessarily consider herself a survivor, but definitely a mutant and a cyborg.

Ágnes Lehóczky’s poetry collections published in the UK are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box, 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box, 2012), Carillonneur (Shearsman, 2014), Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017), Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams & Lies (Crater Press, 2023) and Apropos Paradise Square (Pamenar Press, 2025). She also has three full poetry collections in Hungarian published in Budapest: Ikszedik stáció (Universitas, 2000), Medalion (Universitas, 2002) and Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló, 2015). She is the author of the academic monograph Poetry, the Geometry of Living Substance – comprising four essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy (2011). Her pamphlet Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters was published by Boiler House Press (2017). She co-edited major international anthologies: the Sheffield Anthology (Smith/Doorstop, 2012) with Adam Piette, The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley (Boiler House, 2018) with Zoë Skoulding, Wretched Strangers (Boiler House, 2018) with J. T. Welsch and most recently the ‘Monk Collective’ with Adam Piette (Blackbox Manifold, 2023). Fission of Being – Endnotes on Earthbound was commissioned by The Roberts Institute of Art, London in 2021. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics at the University of Sheffield. With Adam Piette she’s currently working on translations of Attila József (forthcoming in 2026 by Shearsman) and István Vörös (forthcoming in 2026).

Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at Sheffield. He is the co-editor of the international contemporary poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. He edited the special issue of Translation and Literature on “Modernism and Translation”, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson with Katy Price (2007) and The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature with Mark Rawlinson (2012). He is the co-editor of the international contemporary poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He has had poems published in Stand, Adjacent Pineapple and elsewhere, the broadside pamphlet nights as dreaming (Constitutional Information / earthbound press), two collections forthcoming: CCCLXV with Crater Press (October 2025), and Lies Blurring Here with Broken Sleep (April 2026). Forthcoming too in 2026 will be a co-translation of the work of Attila József with Ágnes Lehóczky, with Shearsman in 2026, and an edition of the work of Australian poet Catherine Vidler's work, co-edited with Amelia Dale and A.J. Carruthers, with Puncher & Wattman.

This event is part of the Autumn Reading Series, 2025 organised by the Centre for Poetry and Poetics and will be held in The Project Space, The Lescar. Doors open at 6.15pm, readings begin at 18.30.pm. Copies of Adam Piette's new poetry collection will be on sale, pay by cash only.

This is an in-person event but you can also join us online. PLease log in by no later than 6.30pm: meet.google.com/vqk-imkj-hvh

For more info: https://sheffield.ac.uk/centre-for-poetry-and-poetics/events/sheffield-presents-matthew-cheeseman-logan-collignon-agnes-lehoczk

Recording now available:

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, Presents:

SASCHA AKHTAR & KIMBERLY CAMPANELLO

22nd of May 2025 6.15pm The Diamond, LT6 University of Sheffield

Sascha A. Akhtar is the author of 7 books of poetry, one of fiction. She is also a translator and Creative Writing lecturer at the University of Greenwich. Akhtar has been performing her work for 20 years, highlights include the Poetry Wales Festival, Emirates Festival of Literature and Rotterdam Poetry Festival. Latest writings appear in Fugitives & Futurists, Shuddasar, Deleuzine, Rivista international, Prototype Annual 4, Cut-Purse (Tangerine Press), Of Myths and Mothers anthology and on Lucy Writers Platform. Her debut book of translations from Urdu Belles-Lettres; The Writings of Hijab Imtiaz with Oxford University Press received an Honorable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English. Akhtar's latest social theory in the form of radical visual forms was launched October 2023 at the Small Publisher's Fair. The Ms is out with Intergraphia Press. The Grimoire of Grimalkin was published in a second edition by Prototype Publishers in October 2024.

Kimberly Campanello is the author of the poetry-object and durational performance MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla, 2019). She is an inaugural Markievicz Award winner from Ireland's Arts Council and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht for (S)worn State(s) (The Salvage Press, 2024) with Dimitra Xidous and Annemarie Ní Churreáin and an Arts Council Ireland Literature Project Award for sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication in conversation with Calvino’s Invisible Cities created in collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media. Her next poetry collection An Interesting Detail joins Bloomsbury Poetry's list edited by Kayo Chingonyi in April 2025. Her debut novel Use the Words You Have launches in June 2025 as the inaugural title from Somesuch Editions, the imprint of BAFTA and Oscar-winning production company Somesuch. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.

This event is in person but you can join us on: meet.google.com/gig-eyxz-hks

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, Presents:

SASCHA AKHTAR & KIMBERLY CAMPANELLO

22nd of May 2025 6.15pm The Diamond, LT6 University of Sheffield

Sascha A. Akhtar is the author of 7 books of poetry, one of fiction. She is also a translator and Creative Writing lecturer at the University of Greenwich. Akhtar has been performing her work for 20 years, highlights include the Poetry Wales Festival, Emirates Festival of Literature and Rotterdam Poetry Festival. Latest writings appear in Fugitives & Futurists, Shuddasar, Deleuzine, Rivista international, Prototype Annual 4, Cut-Purse (Tangerine Press), Of Myths and Mothers anthology and on Lucy Writers Platform. Her debut book of translations from Urdu Belles-Lettres; The Writings of Hijab Imtiaz with Oxford University Press received an Honorable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English. Akhtar's latest social theory in the form of radical visual forms was launched October 2023 at the Small Publisher's Fair. The Ms is out with Intergraphia Press. The Grimoire of Grimalkin was published in a second edition by Prototype Publishers in October 2024.

Kimberly Campanello is the author of the poetry-object and durational performance MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla, 2019). She is an inaugural Markievicz Award winner from Ireland's Arts Council and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht for (S)worn State(s) (The Salvage Press, 2024) with Dimitra Xidous and Annemarie Ní Churreáin and an Arts Council Ireland Literature Project Award for sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication in conversation with Calvino’s Invisible Cities created in collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media. Her next poetry collection An Interesting Detail joins Bloomsbury Poetry's list edited by Kayo Chingonyi in April 2025. Her debut novel Use the Words You Have launches in June 2025 as the inaugural title from Somesuch Editions, the imprint of BAFTA and Oscar-winning production company Somesuch. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.

This event is in person but you can join us on: meet.google.com/gig-eyxz-hks

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, presents: Nat Raha & Iris Colomb

Event details

Thursday 13 March 2025 - 6:15pm to 7:30pm

Lecture theatre 2, The Diamond, The University of Sheffield, 32 Leavygreave Road, Sheffield, S3 7RD

Description

Iris Colomb is a poet, artist, and performer, curator, academic and translator based in London. Her practice explores various relationships between visual and verbal forms of text through projects involving performance, book objects, improvisation, and experimental translation. Iris’  individual, collaborative, interactive, and durational performance works have been showcased across the UK as well as in German, Austrian, Romanian, Norwegian, French and Chilean events and festivals. Publications include pamphlets I’m Shocked (Bad Betty Press, 2018),  just promise you won’t write (Gang Press, 2019), Ridiculous Unlikely Attempt (Hesterglock Press, 2023) and Where do you begin in this (Ma Bibliothèque, 2024), as well as inclusions in magazines and anthologies in the UK, Europe, and beyond. Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Performance work includes epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023. Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and co-author of the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’, published in Social Text. This is an in-person event but if you can't be there in person you can log in and watch online (by 6.15pm). Event curated by Agnes Lehoczky.

Recording is now available:

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, Presents:

Centre for Poetry and Poetics: Zoë Skoulding - Mendoza - Harriet Tarlo

CPP/UoS Launch of Cut Flowers 2, Guillemot Press, 2024 by Harriet Tarlo

27th of February, 6pm

Diamond, Lecture Theatre 2, University of Sheffield

Zoë Skoulding - Mendoza - Harriet Tarlo

Mendoza is a Northumbrian poet and researcher. They describe their creative practice as ‘frass’, from the German word fressen, which means "to devour"; collecting, hoarding and (metaphorically) consuming found entomological texts, they reconstitute these texts as poetry, mapping the world through their own embodied language in which familiar and unfamiliar terrain is disrupted. In doing so, they are liberated from neurotypical modes of thinking, de-constructing & (re)constructing the ‘self’ through the language of insects as a necessary act of nonconformity.

Publications include: “WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths” collaboration with Peter Manson: Materials, 2018; “the science of poetry : the poetry of science” Linus Slug / Peter Manson broadside, 2015 and “Type Specimen: An Observant Guide To Linus Slug”, Contraband, 2014. Mendoza’s poetry can be heard at the Archive of the Now

Zoë Skoulding is a poet, performer, translator and literary critic with an interest in ecopoetics. Her sixth and latest collection of poems is A Marginal Sea (Carcanet Press, 2022), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, following Footnotes to Water (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020. In 2020 she also published A Revolutionary Calendar (Shearsman). She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University and lives on Ynys Môn / Anglesey.

Harriet Tarlo’s poetry is published with Shearsman Press, Etruscan books and Guillemot Press. She collaborated for over ten years with the artist Judith Tucker, exhibiting widely here and abroad and publishing five artists’ books with Wild Pansy Press. Her most recent publications are Cut Flowers I and II (2021, 2024); with Judith Tucker, Saltwort (2022) and with Kym Martindale, Spillways (2022). She edited the influential anthology The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011). She is a Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics at Sheffield Hallam University.

For those attending online: please log in by 6.20pm:

meet.google.com/qft-frii-fsj

Event curated by Agnes Lehoczky.

Recording is available now:

Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents: A reading from ‘The Last Unravellings of the Logoclast – Alan Halsey’

During this event there will be short readings from Alan Halsey’s posthumous collection by Geraldine Monk & friends.

Venue: Mappin Building, Mappin Hall, The University of Sheffield

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“Alan Halsey, much missed, always remembered, cherished here so extraordinarily beautifully by Geraldine Monk with this exquisite little collection with Free Poetry, lives on in the scribbles and the artful verses, moving, stimulating, so effortlessly on the button, every page a spirited wonder.” — Adam Piette for Blackbox Manifold

Alan Halsey, 1949-2022 ran the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, U.K. for twenty years and continued to work as a specialist bookseller and editor of West House Books when he moved to Sheffield in 1997. Alan was a poet, artist, publisher, editor, bibliophile, logoclast, scholar and humourist. What was thought to be his final publication Remarks of Uncertain Consequence was published by Five Seasons Press shortly before his death. We now know that it was not his grand finale. Some of his most notable publication amongst his prodigious output include Wittgenstein’s Devil (Stride 2000), Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005), Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006) and Selected Poems 1988-2016 (Shearsman 2017). Five Seasons also published The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995) and Lives of the Poets with Martin Corless-Smith (2009). He edited the three volume Collected Poems of Bill Griffiths’ (Reality Street) and edited and introduced Thomas Lovell Beddoes Death’s Jest-Book (West House Books 2003). As a graphic artist he collaborated with Kelvin Corcoran, Steve McCaffery and Gavin Selerie; his solo text-graphic works include Memory Screen, shown at the Bury Text Festival in 2005, and In White Writing (Xexoxial 2012). With Martin Archer he co-directed and composed pieces for the Sheffield based antichoir Juxtavoices whose third album Warning: May Contain Notes was released on Discus Records in 2016. He was an Affiliated Poet at Sheffield University’s Centre for Poetry and Poetics.

Geraldine Monk’s poetry was first published in the 1970’s. Her major collections include Escafeld Hangings, West House Books (2005) and Interregnum, Creation Books(1995), Selected Poems Salt Publishing (2003) Ghost & Other Sonnets (2008). In 2012 she devised and edited Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition, which she described as a ‘collective autobiography’, Shearsman Books. Her most recent collection They Who Saw the Deep was published in 2016 in the United States by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions.

She lives in Sheffield, England where she ran West House Books and its imprint Gargoyle Editions with her late husband Alan Halsey. She is a founding member of the Sheffield based antichoir Juxtavoices for which she has composed several pieces including We TalkThrough Walls, Midsummer Mummeries and Up & Down at Bishop’s House (with Alan Halsey and fellow collaborator Martin Archer). She is an affiliated poet to The Centre for Poetry and Poetics, University of Sheffield.

Please note, this event is an in-person one so we would love you to be there but if you can't travel you can log in by no later than 6.20pm on the link: meet.google.com/nju-skpq-avt

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/.../reading-last-unravellings...

Recording is now available:

Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents: A Reading with Karl Riordan, Pete Green, Steve Ely and Rory Waterman

5TH OF NOVEMBER THE DIAMOND, LT2, 6PM-8PM

Karl Riordan is a working-class writer based in Sheffield after stints around the UK & Ireland and considering his next move. 'The Tattooist's Chair' is his first poetry collection from Smokestack Press and just published ‘Tinikling’ drawing upon his links with the Philippines. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Sheffield. Daljit Nagra said, he writes of ‘[a]n ordinary world illuminated by a seeing-eye that persistently finds understated wonder.’ By day, he’s worked underage on building sites, was a barber, scrap-collector, teacher, Disability Support Worker, and a postal worker - and lasted a full week. He currently works as a Library Assistant for the Rotherham Library Service. He’s working on another collection of poems and a book of short stories.

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Pete Green is a poet and musician who has lived in Sheffield for 20 years. They grew up in the port of Grimsby, lovingly parented by a fish filleter and a lollipop lady. Living first on the edge of the land itself, and more recently near the edge of a largely post-industrial city, Pete has become preoccupied with the way places fade into each other and shift over time – and perhaps most of all with how people influence places and places influence people. These concerns are the driving force behind Pete's first full-length collection The Meanwhile Sites, published in 2022 by Salt and described by Helen Mort as "feral, elegant and beautifully observed". Much of the book was informed by visits to coastal locations, from Orkney to Dungeness, though these are juxtaposed with observations of big cities, including the temporary London housing estate built from shipping containers which inspired the collection's title. Pete has been active as a musician for far longer than as a poet, though these days they prefer to concentrate on poetry because there's less heavy stuff to carry. Encouraged by discovering the output of Sheffield's Longbarrow Press, Pete started to write poetry again in 2014 after a gap of more than 20 years. Their pamphlet Sheffield Almanac and short book Hemisphere were published by Longbarrow in 2017 and 2021 respectively. Other work by Pete has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Brotherton Poetry Prize, whose chair of judges Simon Armitage praised Pete's "lyrical dexterity" and described them as "a poet alive to the challenges of the post-modernist era".

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Steve Ely is a poet, novelist, biographer and teacher of creative writing. He has published thirteen books or pamphlets of poetry, most recently Eely (Longbarrow Press, 2024) and Orasaigh (Broken Sleep Books, August, 2024). He’s currently working on a critical work, Ted Hughes’s Expressionism, a novel entitled The Quoz and an infinitely expanding, limitless poetic sequence, Terra Incognito.

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Rory Waterman's fourth and most recent collection is Come Here to This Gate, published by Carcanet in April this year. He lives in Nottingham.

Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents: An Hour with Hilson;

Jeff Hilson is a poet, critic, editor and teacher. He has written five books of poetry: stretchers (Reality Street, 2006), Bird bird (Landfill, 2009), In The Assarts (Veer, 2010), Latanoprost Variations (Boiler House Press, 2017) and Organ Music (Crater Press, 2020). He edited The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) and with David Grundy edited a special issue of The British and Irish Journal of Innovative Poetry on the work late Sean Bonney which came out in Autumn 2022. Hilson Hilson, a book of responses to Jeff’s own writing by his peers, edited by Richard Parker, is still available from Crater Press. Jeff runs Xing the Line poetry reading series in London with the poet Iris Colomb. Until recently he taught Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton.

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 than 5.50 on the following link: meet.google.com/mmh-kvgc-mdw

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/centre-for.../events/hour-hilson

recording now available:

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

Recording now available:

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.