Location: The Diamond, LT6

Rachel Genn is a senior lecturer at Manchester Writing School and the University of Sheffield. Formerly a Neuroscientist, she was a Royal Society Fellow at UBC, Canada and has written two novels: THE CURE, (2011) and WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON (2020). She was Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence (2016) creating a quasi-institution called THE NATIONAL FACILITY FOR THE REGULATION OF REGRET, spanning installation and interac-tive art, VR and film (ASFF 2016), presented together at SXSW, 2017. She has non-fiction in Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, and The New Statesman and is currently working on a collection of non-fiction about her family’s injuries, fighting and addiction to regret.

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer employing experimental approaches to inter-genre / interdisciplinary writing, speaking, and reading. This includes an investigation of the problematics and ambiguities of an expanded understanding of translation—between languages and language codes, and between voice, ear, and page. Other methods include works on paper, moving-image, performances, collaborations, and events, and they have paintings and other works in public collections. They are interested in the wider politics of communication, and the conflicts between medical and social models of disability. They are co-edit 'intergraphia books', an experimental press with forthcoming titles by Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, Sascha Akhtar, Mark Goodwin, Jan Hopkins, and more. They teach Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Bolton and are a tutor for the Poetry School. Recent artworks include a commission for the exhibition imPerfekt at the MEWO Kunsthalle Mem-mingem in Germany in 2021, and recent publications include their collection Over, In, and Under (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). Their hybrid long poem/novella Instructions from Light will be published by JOAN Publishing later this year.

Mendoza, aka Linus Slug: Insect Librarian, is a poet and researcher investigating disembodiment, liminal space and marginal entities through poetic practice. Poems emerge from the process of collecting, hoarding and (met-aphorically) consuming found entomological texts and reconstituting this material as poetry. Exploring the idea of containment through self-imposed boundaries, the sequences are written in sets of nine, each component containing nine lines or multiples of nine, frequently with nine syllables per line in which familiar terrain is dis-rupted. In doing so, they are liberated from neurotypical modes of thinking allowing them to deconstruct / (re)construct the ‘self’ through the language of insects. It is an act of nonconformity. Publications include: “WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths” collaboration with Peter Manson: Materials, 2018, “Entro" & "Un-love Son-nots" Gutteral, 2017; “the science of poetry: the poetry of science” Linus Slug / Peter Manson broadside, 2015 and “Type Specimen: An Observant Guide To Linus Slug”, Contra-band, 2014. Mendoza’s poetry can be heard at the Archive of the Now.

Please note: This is an in-person event, however there will be a live stream which you can request to attend online: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/421965408897