The Sussex Poetry Festival, now in its eighth year, attracts
underground poets and enthusiasts from across the UK and overseas to
perform, celebrate, and discuss their writing. The festival is not
plugged into corporate publishing agendas but rather is intimate,
participatory, and conversational. Readings and performances are
politically searching and invested in exploring the possibilities of
unconventional modes of writing and performing. The festival is
organized each year by staff from the University of Sussex.
LINE-UP (ALPHABETICAL):
Robbie Bailey-Caulfield
Robbie Bailey-Caulfield is a poet studying in Brighton, is the
offspring of seventeen breaches of contract (also known as liquidated
damages) and is therefore thoroughly reasonable according to the
specific merits of the case. His work can be found on The Literateur.
Eleanor Careless
Eleanor Careless is a PhD student at Sussex, and writes about
representations of gender and violence in the poetry of Anna
Mendelssohn. She was a 2016 British Council research fellow, co-edits
The Literateur, co-convenes the Gender, Sexuality and Violence
research network and helps Joe Luna to run Hi Zero.
Abigail Child
Abigail Child is a media artist and writer who pushes the envelope of
sound-image-text relations with humor, liveliness and complex
“plangent, friable, nacreous, lambent, sinewy…and syncopated” montage.
An award-winning filmmaker, Child is the author of six books of
poetry, among them A Motive for Mayhem, Scatter Matrix and her most
recent MOUTH TO MOUTH, as well as a book of criticism THIS IS CALLED
MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film (2005) from University of Alabama
Press. Winner of the Rome Prize, Radcliffe Institute, Guggenheim and
Fulbright Fellowships, as well as participating in two Whitney
Biennials, (1989, 1997), Child has had numerous retrospectives and
solo shows worldwide. Her most recent film, ACTS & INTERMISSIONS
premiered at MoMA Doc Fortnight Feb 2017.
Ellen Dillon
Ellen Dillon lives in Co. Limerick in the south of Ireland. She is
working on a PhD project on dynamic abstraction in contemporary poetry
at the School of English in DCU, Dublin. She has read at the Soundeye
festival in Cork, and has had work published in journals in Ireland
and the UK, including Revival and Zarf. She is currently working on
poems for a first collection, Potential Space, and a second, Sonnets
to Malkmus, not necessarily in that order.
Helen Dixon
Helen Dixon is a british/canadian/nicaraguan queer feminist writer
most of whose poetry is bilingual Spanish/English. Helen’s
publications include two books of poetry and poetic prose: Flight Over
the Abyss/Vuelo sobre el abismo (Nicaraguan Writers Union CNE Managua
2003) and Olimpia/Olympia (beyond borders, Reykjavik 2006), and
inclusion in the anthologies: In our own voice (Canada 1995), Memoria
Poética (Nicaragua 2005), Nicaragua en las redes de la poesía
(Nicaragua 2008), Dos Orillas (Catalunya 2008) and El Güegüense al pie
de Bobadilla (Nicaragua 2008). Helen’s work has also been published in
magazines and supplements in Canada, the Canary Islands, Mexico,
Nicaragua, Brazil, Cuba, and the UK. Helen is a member of the
Nicaraguan Women Writers Union and co-founder of the Latin American
Feminist Writers Network and currently studies and teaches at the
University of Sussex.
William Fuller
William Fuller’s books include Playtime, Hallucination, Watchword,
Sadly (all Flood Editions) and Quorum (Seagull); the chapbook Magic
Comma Natural is forthcoming from Crater Press. Many years ago he
received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. For the
last three decades he has worked at a trust company in Chicago.
Calum Gardner
Calum Gardner is a poet, itinerant poetry teacher & scholar, editor of
Zarf magazine and the associated pamphlet press Zarf Editions, and
(with Gloria Dawson) co-runs the monthly Zarf poetry reading series in
Leeds. Calum’s poetry has been published in places like Datableed,
Poetry Wales, The Literateur, and Jungftak. Their pamphlet stuff and
void is forthcoming from Stale Objects dePress of Melbourne.
Charlie Housham
Charlie Housham is a final-year student of English Literature at the
University of Sussex.
Daniel Lourenço
Daniel Lourenço is a Portuguese researcher, poet and activist based in
Lisbon, Portugal. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Faculty of
Arts of the University of Lisbon, with a project on experimental
models of relationality and affectivity in the works of contemporary
experimental women authors. He has had a compilation of his poetry -
"Lábio/Abril" (2015), a performative queer-feminist re-imagining of
the Portuguese Carnation Revolution - published by Traveller, an
independent Portuguese press. He was a founding member of the
transqueerfeminist collective Lóbula and a collaborator with the
Panteras Rosa (Pink Panthers).
Mitchel Pass
Mitchel Pass lives in Brighton and studies English Literature at the
University of Sussex.
Joseph Persad
Joseph Persad lives in London. Moot Press have published a book of
poems, Content.
Vicky Sparrow
Vicky is completing a PhD about the poet-activist Anna Mendelssohn at
Birkbeck, University of London. Her writing can be found in datableed,
Litmus, Front Horse, Intercapillary Space and the Literateur. Vicky's
first pamphlet Notes to Selves was published by Zarf Editions last
year.
Eirik Steinhoff
Eirik Steinhoff lives in Olympia (Washington) where he teaches and
co-teaches classes with names like ‘How to do things with words,’
‘Imperialisms,’ and ‘A New Middle East?’ at The Evergreen State
College. A 2007 interview he did with William Fuller was published in
Quid. A collection of pamphlets he circulated in late 2011 and early
2012, called A Fiery Flying Roule, is forthcoming from Station Hill
Press of Barrytown. He co-edits Black Box: A Record of the
Catastrophe. His essays on poetry and sabotage have appeared in
postmedieval, Black Box, and Floor Journal.
Lotta Thießen
Lotta Thießen is a poet, translator and co-organiser of the reading
series artiCHOKE. Her works and collaborations can be found online at
Datableed, Otoliths, Elyra and RadfürAlle.bandcamp.com. Her first
chapbook “In This” was published in the Summer of 2016. She grew up in
Portugal and is now based in Berlin.
Karl M V Waugh
Karl M V Waugh is a musician, poet and mathematician based in
Brighton. Karl’s musical output is prolific. He has worked and
collaborated with many musicians over the years and plays regularly
with Chloe Wallace (as The Zero Map) alongside his band The Emperors
of Ice Cream and the noisy dangerous playgroup duo Binnsclagg with
Verity Spott. Karl’s book of poetry “Obsessed by Proportions” is
available from Sad Press. Karl keeps a blog of writing and
photography. He also has a bandcamp page where many albums can be
found. Directions to both are below:
https://karlmvwaugh.wordpress.com/
https://disillusiondotdotdot.bandcamp.com/
Zia X
Zia is an obsessive social media diarist whose aim is to explore the intersections between personal, interpersonal, theoretical, and creative modes of producing and living work. Their current creative practice is informed by zero-hour contracts, posthumanism, hunger, precarious living situations, and the utopian hope that their gait would not inspire suspicion and rage.
Liao Yiwu with Michael Day
Liao Yiwu (Chinese: 廖亦武; also known as Lao Wei) (born 1958 in Sichuan), is a Chinese author, reporter, musician, and poet. He is a critic of China's Communist regime, for which he has been imprisoned. His books, several of which are collections of interviews with ordinary people from the lower rungs of Chinese society, were published in Taiwan and Hong Kong but are banned in mainland China; some have been translated into English, French, German, Polish and Czech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liao_Yiwu
The Sussex Poetry Festival Webisite:
https://sussexpofest.wordpress.com/
ACCESSIBILITY:
The Rose Hill is a wheelchair-accessible venue, but unfortunately does not (yet) have wheelchair-accessible toilets. There are, however, accessible toilets yards from the venue, inside The World's End pub on London Road. The festival will be seated. There is a bar in the venue, and an outside smoking area.
Friday : 6pm - 10.00pm
Saturday : 1pm - 11.00pm
Tickets OTD:
Single session:£3 // Friday all sessions:£6 // Saturday all sessions:£12
Whole weekend:£15
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