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the87press celebrates its 3rd Birthday with a poetry reading featuring John Wilkinson, Holly Pester, Rogelio Braga, and Fred Spoiler

the87press resumes its in-person live reading series at the Roebuck SE1 on 15th July 2021.
4 poets will read and capacity is reduced to 30 with social distancing measures in place.
The event will open at 7pm so please arrive on-time for a 7.30pm start.
Books will be on sale and can be bought using CARD ONLY.

John Wilkinson is an English poet now Director of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago and a Professor in the Department of English. His publications stretch back to 1976, but his most recent books are My Reef My Manifest Array (poetry, Carcanet 2019), Lyric in Its Times (criticism, Bloomsbury Academic 2019), The Following (essays, The Last Books 2000) and this year, Wood Circle (poem cycle, The Last Books). Before leaving for the US in 2005, he worked for the National Health Service in the East End of London, where he was the public health lead for mental health.

Holly Pester is a poet and writer. She has worked in sound art and performance, with BBC Radio, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection. She has written critical creative work on lullabies and rest/worksongs, and her debut collection, Comic Timing was published by Granta in February 2021.

Rogelio Braga is an exiled playwright, novelist, essayist, publisher, and human rights activist from the Philippines. They had published two novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of plays before they left the archipelago in 2018. Braga was a Fellow for Theatre of the Asian Cultural Council in New York in 2016. Miss Philippines, their first play written entirely in English is currently under development commissioned by the New Earth Theatre in London. Braga's new play Till Human Voices Wake Us is part of Theatre Témoin's NHS Yarns project with the Mercury Theatre in Colchester.

fred spoliar is a poet and education worker living in London. Recent poems can be found in publications including algia, datableed, erotoplasty, PIGS, and tentacular.

Poets:

Caspar Heinemann is a poet, artist, and academia-adjacent independent researcher based in London and Berlin. His research interests include critical mysticism, gay biosemiotics, illegitimate communisms, and professional irreverence. He has previously written on a pantheon including John Wieners, Diane di Prima, Paul Thek, and Derek Jarman. He holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. Novelty Theory is his first book.

Wendy Lotterman's chapbook Intense Holiday was published by After Hours LTD. She is finishing a PhD in comparative literature at NYU where she also teaches.

Édith Azam was born in 1973 in the southern French region of Occitanie. She worked as a schoolteacher for three years before devoting herself to full-time writing. Her collections include Mercure (2011), Caméra (2015), and Pour tenir debout on invente (2019), co-authored with Liliane Giraudon.

Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph. D from the University of California, Berkeley. Moten teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018) and All that Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.

Poets:

Kat Addis got drawn into an ongoing series of misunderstandings involving Petrarch and as a result her first book of poems, Space Parsley, is forthcoming from the87press. She also experiments in performance, costumes (especially hats) and music, usually with other people. Some of her recent poems are in Blackbox Manifold, Gloam Journal, Chicago Review, and Stand.

Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is the author of “Someone’s Dead Already”, “Waiting Behind Tornados for Food”, and "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" which was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His forthcoming book “Blood On The Fog” is being released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.

Peter Gizzi recent books include Now It’s Dark (2020) and Archeophonics (2016). Also in 2020, Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems came out from Carcanet. For more info: petergizzi.org

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015); an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fifth and most recent volume is Late Arcade (New Directions, 2017); and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone and co-editor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993). His awards and honours include the National Book Award for poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the William B. Hart Residency in Poetry at the American Academy in Rome, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress. He is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University. Double Trio, a boxed set of three books of poetry, was published last week by New Directions.

the87press and Shearsman Books warmly invite you to celebrate the launch of Anna Mendelssohn's collected poetry (edited by Sara Crangle).

Sara Crangle is Professor of Modernism & the Avant-Garde at the University of Sussex. Her books include Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey, 2011), and, with Peter Nicholls, On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (Bloomsbury, 2012)

Poppy O’Shaughnessy Mendelssohn’s eldest child

Lynne Harries Mendelssohn’s longstanding friend

Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is the author and editor of books on 19th and 20th century fiction, 20th century poetry, violence and avant garde art, and language and cultural history. He's also editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets, which published 4 of Anna Mendelssohn’s books and pamphlets. A translator of Polish poetry, Mengham’s own books of poetry include Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001), Chance of a Storm (Carcanet, 2015) and Grimspound & Inhabiting Art (Carcanet, 2018). In 2020, he was given a Cholmondely Award for Poetry by the UK Society of Authors.

Frances Kruk is a Polish-Canadian poet and artist from Calgary, AB. Her most recent books are lo-fi frags in-progress (Veer, 2015), and PIN (yt communication, 2014). Many of her written and visual werx are featured in the anthologies Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (Reality Street, 2015) and Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010). She has performed and presented internationally at experimental poetry festivals and scholarly symposia. London and birdsong live in her lungs.

Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh. Her third collection of poetry is of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018). Nat's recent publications include 'blubber, guts, southern leith', a long poem on Edinburgh's role in industrial whaling and its near-ecocide, in MAP Magazine (online); 'Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now', a special issue of Third Text journal (January 2021), co-edited with Fiona Anderson and Glyn Davis; and the pamphlet four dreams (Earthbound Poetry Series, 2020). Nat completed a PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is a Research Fellow on the 'Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism' project at the University of St Andrews, which will open an exhibition at Glasgow Women's Library in late Summer. She co-edits Radical Transfeminism Zine.

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019); Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020); and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2021). He is currently working on books about risk analysis and divination; the Cantares Mexicanos; and the mytheme of Atlantis. He is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches in the department of Creative Writing.

John Wilkinson is an English poet living in the United States where he is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. His most recent book of poetry is My Reef My Manifest Array from Carcanet; and Bloomsbury recently re-published his critical book Lyric in Its Times in paperback. This June, The Last Books will publish a new cycle of poems titled Wood Circle.

Verity Spott is a poet from Brighton. Verity teaches poetry as part of the Creative Writing Programme and is the author of (most recently) Coronelles Set 1 (Veer Books) and Hopelessness (The 87 Press, https://tinyurl.com/87Verity).