Shifting Poetic Landscapes Kimberly Campanello, Gail McConnell and Thembe Mvula in conversation with Tapasya Narang
Join us for a special lunchtime filled with poetry and conversation, where poets Kimberly Campanello, Gail McConnell and Thembe Mvula will be in conversation with academic Tapasya Narang about how spaces and access have shifted within the poetic landscape with regards to including the voices of marginalised identities and exploring what it means to nurture and develop your voice as a contemporary poet, in the backdrop of poets who have come before.
Kimberly Campanello‘s most recent projects are MOTHERBABYHOME, a 796-page visual poetry-object and reader’s edition book (zimZalla, 2019), and sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication produced in collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media. She is an inaugural Markievicz Award winner from Ireland’s Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Arts Council, and she represented the UK in Munich at Klang Farben Text: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century, a festival organised by the British Council, the National Poetry Library, and Lyrik Kabinett. New poems have appeared in Granta, Poetry Review, Cambridge Literary Review, The White Review, and Poetry Ireland Review. New prose features in Tolka and in Somesuch Stories. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.
Gail McConnell is from Belfast. She is interested in living with the dead, violence, creatureliness and queerness. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She has also published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, two poetry pamphlets – Fothermather and Fourteen – and made two arts features based on her poetry for BBC Radio 4. Gail is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast.
Thembe Mvula is a South African/British writer and poet. She is an alum of the Obsidian Foundation, Barbican Young Poets and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Thembe has headlined nationally and internationally, including at Tate Lates, Oslo Afro Arts festival and has featured at Latitude festival. Her poetry has been anthologised in Part of a Story That Started Before Me (Penguin Random House, 2023), Before Them, We (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2022), The Black Anthology (10:10 Press, 2021) and appears in Magma magazine issues 77 and 83 and Rowayat. She recently completed a masters in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, specialising in screenwriting.
Dr Tapasya Narang is an academic, arts administrator and literary editor. In all these roles, her aim is draw attention to lesser-known yet impactful literary and artistic productions by emerging writers. She guest edited Poetry Ireland’s Trumpet 11 on the theme of ephemerality; the issue celebrated short-lived and lesser known poetic productions by minority voices in Ireland. Currently, she is conducting her research on Irish, and Indian small presses at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. Her work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Irish University Review, The Poetry Review, and RTE Brainstorm.
Thembe Mvula appearance supported by the British Council in collaboration with The Times and the Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival.
