Friday 14 October 2022, 7.30pm
You are warmly invited to join the87press for the launch of five new books, 3 collections of poetry, 1 translated collection of poetry, and a novel.
Featuring poets and writers: Fran Lock, Gareth Farmer, Danny Hayward, Jessica Widner, and Laura Doyle Péan (who will join us via a virtual reading), the event will be blended together with the warm Latinx sounds of Manuka Honey + Peter Gizzi.
The five new titles launched on this evening of festivity will bring together topics such as struggles with mental health, break-up love-songs, autism and woodwork, Gypsy-Roma Traveller rights, reflections on work during the Covid-19 Pandemic and post-pandemic recession, alongside a novel in which a poet dies and haunts two protagonists, a ballet dancer and a mortician. Expect sauciness, sassiness, and sincerity. Two of these titles are Poetry Book Society recommendations for Winter 2022.
Over the last four years, the87press’ bold and daring challenge to the failure of diversity and inclusion initiatives has been well received by a growing international grassroots readership. the87press focuses attention across spectrums of underrepresentation, featuring regular work from racialised, LGBTQ+, Neurodiverse, and working class writers across genres, forms, and contexts. This event marks the beginning of the fifth year of operations, against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile climate for the arts and humanities, your support for the growing partnership between Café Oto and the87press is much appreciated!
For more about the87press please visit www.the87press.co.uk
This event is brought to you in partnership with The Sonic Agent.
Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and ten poetry collections. Her most recent chapbook is Forever Alive (Dare-Gale Press, 2022), and her most recent collections are Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (Pamenar Press, 2021) and White/ Other (87 Press, 2022). Fran is the newly appointed Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University. She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters, a member of the new Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review.
Gareth Farmer is an autistic writer and academic based in Shefford, UK. His academic work focuses on poetry, poetics and literary aesthetics and he has published a number of poetry chapbooks, pamphlets and books, most recently, Strategic Forms: or, 74 Questions; 92 Solutions (2021) and Diurnal Sweigh (2018).
Danny Hayward has published books of poetry with Materials, Veer, Shit Valley and others. A volume of his essays on poetry, Wound Building, was published in autumn 2021 by Punctum Press and can be downloaded for free at the Punctum website. He maintains the out-of-print poetry pdf archive Free Trials.
Jessica Widner is a writer and academic. Her work has appeared in Extra Teeth, Gutter Magazine, and The Cardiff Review. Interiors is her first novel.
Laura Doyle Péan (they/them) is a communication & cinema graduate, McGill Law & Gender Studies student, poet and activist. The 22-year-old Haitian-Quebecois artist is interested in the links between language and identity, and in the role art plays in social transformations and social movements. Laura published their first book, Cœur Yoyo, in 2020, and has participated in many artistic productions with the queer feminist collective Les Allumeuses.
Stuart Bell is a translator of French literature. He studied Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge where he was later Translator in Residence (2021). His previous publications include Bird Me (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and Yo-yo Heart which was selected by the Poetry Book Society as their 2022 Winter Translation Choice. He also edited the 2021 collection Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience, the inaugural issue of The South London Cultural Review.
Bringing chaos, sensuality and ecstatic motion to her productions and selections, Manuka Honey circles club music’s most compelling fringes. In just a few short years, she’s cultivated an idiosyncratic sound that’s shuttled her from continent to continent, assembling a tight catalog of EPs, remixes and singles that harness the energy of Latin-American and Caribbean dance sounds, infusing it into radical new structures. A DJ, producer, multi-disciplinary artist and professional astrologer, Marissa Malik was born and raised in the US before she relocated to London, bringing her hot, humid aura to rainy England. She’s animated by the complex alchemy of the dancefloor, and as likely to reference experimental sounds as she is cumbia or dembow.
PETER GIZZI recent books include, Now It's Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2020), and Archeophonics (Finalist for the National Book Award, Wesleyan, 2016). A new book, Fierce Elegy, is forthcoming from Wesleyan in 2023.
His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation. He has twice been the recipient of The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018 Wesleyan brought out In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi.
His editing projects have included o•blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and with the late Kevin Kilian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008).
He teaches poetry and poetics in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
