The Bristol Poetry Institute invites you to join us in May for another series of short Zoom readings.

Take a poetry break Tuesday evenings and enjoy an opportunity to hear Tjawangwa Dema, Nathaniel Farrell, and William Thompson share their recent work.

• 6pm BST Tues May 3: Tjawangwa Dema
• 6pm BST Tues May 10: Nathaniel Farrell
• 6pm BST Tues May 17: William Thompson

Tjawangwa Dema is author of The Careless Seamstress, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Her chapbook Mandible was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets box set. She has received fellowships and residencies from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Northwestern University’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Danish International Visiting Artist program, amongst others. Tjawangwa has given readings/facilitated workshops in over twenty countries and her poetry and essays on poetic pedagogies have been featured in various publications, most recently New Daughters of Africa, Botswana Women Write and the MLA’s Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. Tjawangwa sits on a number of poetry festival and institute boards and is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. Her poetry has been translated into several languages. In addition to two book translations, her collection, an/other pastoral, was published by No Bindings in April 2022. 

Born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, Nathaniel Farrell is a poet, collage artist, and educator. His first two books of poetry — Newcomer (2014) and Lost Horizon (2019) — are published by Ugly Duckling Presse. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University, where he studied Modernist American poetry, and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri where he teaches composition at Washington University. His collages have been included in exhibitions in New York and Missouri and, like his poetry, engage problems of American national identity, including settler colonial fantasies, consumer culture, and environmental degradation.

William Thompson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. Born in Cambridgeshire in 1991, his work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Wild Court, The Honest Ulsterman, One Hand Clapping, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-21 (Eyewear).

Free and open to all. Register in advance for these events via Zoom.