Word-Mead Bring: A poetry gala
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Huntingdon Room, King's Manor, Exhibition Square (Map)
Event details
Join us for an evening of poetic celebration with performances from Jason Allen-Paisant, Anthony V. Capildeo and Maya Caspari. Optional Dress Code: Bling up the North. The event is free, but please book a ticket via Eventbrite.
About the speakers
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Professor Anthony Capildeo earned their DPhil in Old Norse literature and translation theory as a Rhodes Scholar at Christ Church, University of Oxford. They are one of the most exciting contemporary poets, and highly influential as a writer, commentator, and performer. Anthony was recently awarded both the highly prestigious Windham Campbell Prize and the Bocas Prize for Poetry 2024. Capildeo’s poems engage themes of geographic, intimate, and linguistic distances and proximities. Their books include No Traveller Returns (2003), Utter (2013), Measures of Expatriation (2016), which won the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Collection, Venus as a Bear (2018), Skin Can Hold (2019), Like a Tree, Walking (2021) and Polkadot Wounds (2024), a collection inspired by the living, recycled, and ruined stones of Launceston, Cornwall, the Charles Causley Trust , and the local martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne.
Dr Maya Caspari is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her research focuses on the ethics of representation, particularly in contemporary creative representations of modernity’s violent histories. She is interested in questions of relationality, touch and care and how contemporary writers engage these topics in their approaches to research and creative form. Maya's poetry has appeared in journals including The Poetry Review, Ambit and Butcher’s Dog. She has been Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes, longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and Mslexia Poetry Prize, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her pamphlet, Almost, With Tenderness, is out now from Out-Spoken Press.
Professor Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and multi-award-winning poet. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry. His debut poetry collection Thinking with Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize, and was an Irish Times and White Review book of the year. Self-Portrait as Othello, his sophomore book of poems, won the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023 — the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize; it is one of the rare books to have accomplished this feat. Jason holds a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds. Currently, he is Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and an associate editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. His latest publication, The Possibility of Tenderness, a work of literary nonfiction, is published in the UK (2025) by Heineman Hutchinson and in the US (2025) by Milkweed Editions.
Venue details
Wheelchair accessible