Centre for Poetry and Poetics: Seita, Raha, Ramayya & Matsumoto

details of the event and further poet(s) tbc.

Sophie Seita is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher. Her performances, lecture-performances, and videos, which visualise, embody, or translate text via poetry, dramatic dialogue, costume, choreography, and installation, have been presented at Art Night London, SAAS-Fee Summer Institute of Art (Berlin), Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge), the Royal Academy, Bold Tendencies (London), the Arnolfini (Bristol), La MaMa Galleria (NYC), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Parasol Unit (London), Company Gallery (NYC), and elsewhere. She’s the author of the poetry and performance books Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015) and Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), and the artist book 12 Steps (Wide Range, 2012); the translator of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna*, 2017); and the editor of a facsimile reprint of The Blind Man (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), named one of the Best Art Books of 2017 by The New York Times. Other work has been featured in the LRB, the TLS, The White Review, Bomb, Emergency Index, Lana Turner, Hotel, and 3:AM. She is also currently a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her scholarly book Provisional Avant-Gardes is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2019.

Nisha Ramayya's poetry pamphlets Notes on Sanskrit (2015) and Correspondences (2016) are published by Oystercatcher Press. With Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil, she co-authored Threads (2018), a creative-critical pamphlet published by clinic. Her work can be found online in The Believer, Blackbox Manifold, and the White Review. She is a member of the Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK research group and the interdisciplinary practice-based-research group Generative Constraints.

Nat Raha is a poet and trans / queer activist, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is the author of numerous pamphlets and three collections of poetry: of sirens / body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, forthcoming), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013) and Octet (Veer Books, 2010). She’s performed and published her work internationally. Her creative and critical writing has recently appeared in the Chicago Review, Datableed, The Believer Logger and the South Atlantic Quarterly, and in the anthology Wretched Strangers: Borders, Movement, Homes. Nat is currently completing a PhD in queer Marxism and contemporary poetry at the University of Sussex, and starting as a Postdoctoral researcher on Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS queer sexual cultures at the Edinburgh College of Art. She is the co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine.

Lila Matsumoto’s publications include Urn & Drum (Shearsman), Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press) and Allegories from my kitchen (Sad Press). She teaches poetry at University of Nottingham, convenes the poetry platform Nottingham Poetry Exchange and co-runs the arts magazine and performance night Front Horse. https://fronthorse.wordpress.com/ Lila is a member of the musical group Food People; releases include Animal Work (Beartown Records) and Vetch (Chocolate Monk).