Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents: Maria Sledmere / Carol Watts / Katharine Kilalea

Maria Sledmere is an artist, poet and lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. She also teaches at the University of Glasgow and Beyond Form Creative Writing. She is editor-in-chief of SPAM Press, a member of A+E Collective and recent writer in residence at The Grammarsow in West Cornwall. Her latest books are Cocoa and Nothing, with Colin Herd (SPAM Press, 2023), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022), Cherry Nightshade (slub press, 2022), Sans Soleil — with fred spoliar (Face Press/Mermaid Motel, 2022) and String Feeling (Erotoplasty Editions, 2022). Her debut collection The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021) was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2022, and she recently co-edited an anthology, The Last Song: Words for Frightened Rabbit, with Aaron Kent for Broken Sleep Books.

Carol Watts is a poet whose work is ‘characterised by a deep attentiveness to perception as an aspect of ecological thinking’ (Zoe Skoulding). She has published eleven works of poetry, and often collaborates with others in making and performing, such as with the sound artist Will Montgomery (https://selvageflame.bandcamp.com/album/inoculate-me). Her writing attends to lived and often hidden and entangled histories of extraction, migration and community, from weedy marginal land (Dockfield, Equipage 2017) to the planetary (Sundog, Veer 2013 and Where Blue Light Falls, Shearsman, 2018). Her most recent poetry collection Kelptown (Shearsman, 2020) explored the UK south coast as a hallucinatory and adaptive zone of inundation. She is currently documenting the life of a seasonal pond on London's Blackheath, a place associated over centuries with protest and gatherings.

Katharine Kilalea grew up in South Africa and moved to the UK to study for an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut poetry collection, One Eye’d Leigh (2009), was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30. Her debut novel, OK, Mr Field, was published in 2018.

Please note this is an in-person event but live streaming available: meet.google.com/frk-fhyd-fzv

Readings will be followed by short Q&A by Dr Agi Lehoczky.