An evening of poetry and spoken word
Friday 12 April 2024 7 - 8.30pm
John Madejski Fine Rooms | Burlington House
£10, £8
Friends of the RA book first
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now
Start your weekend with an evening of poetry and spoken word, inspired by our exhibition 'Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change'.
Join us in the John Madejski Fine Rooms for an evening of poetry performed live.
We'll delve into some of the themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging which are explored in Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change.
Expect personal stories, creative riffs and new perspectives at this night of art and poetry.
£10, £8
Friends of the RA book first
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now
About the poets
Malika Booker is a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, who lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University, and co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). Her pamphlet Breadfruit, received a Poetry Society recommendation and her collection Pepper Seed was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3 (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow, A Complete Works fellow, inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). She is the first woman to win the Forward Prize for Best Single poem twice: The Little Miracles (2020) and Libation (2023).
Dami Folayan is a Black woman Christian poet, theorist and sociologist. She is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge looking at the experiences of Black women at Oxbridge, past and present through the lens of coloniality using Critical Poetic Inquiry. Dami’s poetry lies at the intersection of academic theorisation and painting pictures through words to give her readers and listeners a comprehensive understanding of the concepts and experiences at the centre of her work.
Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol who has won over ten slam, been featured on the BBC, and has been invited to perform all over the world. Her poem on the historic toppling of Edward Colston's statue 'Hollow' gained over 600,000 views on Twitter in three days. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books, was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019 and is currently writing a book of essays, Neverland (Canongate, 2024) and her first novel.
Roy McFarlane is the National Canal Laureate, a former Birmingham Poet Laureate and one of the Bards of Brum, who performed in the Opening Ceremony for Birmingham Commonwealth Games 2022. He has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes award, and his third collection Living by Troubled Waters (Nine Arches Press 2022) is out now.
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