Saturday 23 November 2024, 7pm
Welcome back to MUSHAIRA, an evening of poetry, performance, and music curated by the87press. Join us this November for an exciting lineup celebrating the launch of four new titles: The Pharmacy by Kat Sinclair, OSSIA by Jimin Seo, Son of Sin by Omar Sakr, and The Voice of Sheila Chandra by Kazim Ali. We’re thrilled that all four authors are able to join us in London to read from their latest works! Each author will read for 20 minutes.
DJs Jimmy Two Shoes and Andrew Ashong will keep the energy alive with good vibes and smooth tunes throughout the night.
We’re also excited to welcome back The Syrian Sunflower, who will offer a pop-up kitchen with delicious Levantine cuisine available for purchase. Enjoy a variety of vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options at affordable prices.
Omar Sakr is a writer who opposes the genocide of Palestine, and racist imperialist violences everywhere. He is the son of Arab and Turkish Muslim migrants, and the author of three poetry collections, most recently Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023), as well as a novel, Son of Sin (the87press, 2024). He lives on unceded Dharug land.
Kat Sinclair is a poet living in Southampton and a 2024 PhD candidate researching the political economy of feminised robots. She is the author of Very Authentic Person (the87press, 2019), PLEASE PRESS (Sad Press, 2022), and pamphlets with Face Press and Earthbound Press. Her work has also appeared in Chicago Review, Datableed, and in collections from SPAM Press and Dostoevsky Wannabe. She runs the Placeholder poetry reading series between Brighton and Southampton.
Jimin Seo was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. He is the author of OSSIA, winner of The Changes Book Prize. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, annulet, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London, and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina's Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.
Kazim Ali is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, essay, fiction, and cross-genre work. He has also edited an anthology of Muslim writers and books of critical writing on poets Agha Shahid Ali, Jean Valentine, and Shreela Ray, as well as translated books by Marguerite Duras, Ananda Devi, and Sohrab Sepehri. After teaching positions at various colleges including Oberlin, Davidson, and St. Mary's College of California, he was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where he currently chairs the Department of Literature.
Forever a humble student of the dancefloor, Jimmy Two Shoes is inspired by music and its capacity for creating those magical moments. As a Subtle Radio resident and multi-genre label boss of Sub Merchants, Jwarn seamlessly navigates an array of bass-infused flavors, delivering the flows to wriggle your toes to.
Dr Aditi is a thinker and creator, writer and dreamer.
Having worked at the intersections of law, culture and politics in various capacities, Aditi is motivated by a politics of refusal, living in rupture as rapture; turning away from hegemonic worlds of oppression and tuning into something different, beyond the world we live in and moving to the rhythms of an elsewhere. It is this compulsion which guides her pedagogy in the education work she does. Riffing off education for liberation, she creates spaces of (un)learning as a site of radical praxis, using tools of music, film and visual culture, to unpack the ways in which ideologies of oppression and liberation travel through cultural production. She teaches her own course, Rhythm, Race, Revolution as well as courses at different London-based academic institutions.
With a particular interest in creativity as decolonial praxis, she situates the imagination as a radical site of refusal and resistance. Her research work examines the different ways in which Black and Brown cultural production has activated autonomous modes of meaning-making and self-determination in London, through contesting racialised norms and (re)imagining racialised postcolonial subjectivities. And it is through an ethic of jazz that Aditi curates this work.
