Welcome
Hello Jeremy,
Thanks for checking out our latest newsletter! We've compiled a selection of upcoming events featuring Peepal Tree authors. Three of these events can be attended online as well as in person.
We have four UK events for you between now and the end of March — two in Huddersfield and two in Leeds. One is the Leeds launch for Glimpse, and the other three feature Peepal Tree poet Adam Lowe. One of these events is a hybrid format "ask the agent or editor" panel, which you can attend via Zoom or in person.
There are also two events taking place at the end of March at the UWI campus in Mona, featuring Peepal Tree author Geoffrey Philp. Both of these — including the launch of his new book Archipelagos — will also be livestreamed on YouTube.
All the best,
Adam and the Peepal Tree team
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#BlackBoyJoyGone: REALISE
Saturday 25 February, 7.30-10pm
Price: £5 + booking fee | Venue: The Leeds Library, 18 Commercial Street, Leeds, LS1 6AL
Book online
After a sell-out show at HOME in Manchester, the highly anticipated follow-up to the moving docu-poem #BlackBoyJoyGone hits Leeds.
#BlackBoyJoyGone: REALISE is a Black disabled/neurodiverse-led night of performance, empowering Black men and masc/trasmasc people to speak up and share their stories of mental ill health and trauma.
Hosted by Peepal Tree poet Adam Lowe, four artists premiere brand new works across artforms to share their experiences, provoke public discussion, and support collective healing.
Bola Olagunju
Presenting: Tearing Flesh
Tayo Aluko
Presenting: Dodging Bullets
Randolph Matthews
Presenting: Echoes of the Past Unveiling Secrets
Chad Taylor
Presenting: Closer to My Dreams
The sharing is followed by a screening of the film, #BlackBoyJoyGone, directed by Ashley Karrell and Isaac Ouro-Gnao, written and performed by Isaac Ouro-Gnao, with music by Randolph Matthews. #BlackBoyJoyGone: REALISE executive produced by Adam Lowe.
Get involved, find out more or buy tickets online now.
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Praise for Glimpse
“These brilliant Black British creatives are writing themselves into speculative pasts and futures, widening an ever-growing circle of new visionary work that reimagines identities and cultures in a masterful form that readers love, the short story.”
Sheree Renée Thomas
Editor, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
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Glimpse is the first anthology of speculative fiction by Black British writers, showcasing a variety of distinctive and exclusive narratives. They include Afrofuturistic, magic realism and transformational stories, glancing into different worlds and new lives. These stories create a dichotomy between the comfortable and the mysterious, tantalizing in their mystique and refreshing in their insight.
The contributors include Patience Agbabi, Muli Amaye, Alinah Azadeh, Judith Bryan, Patricia Cumper, Joshua Idehen, Melissa Jackson-Wagner, Peter Kalu, Ronnie McGrath, Katy Massey, Claudia Monteith, Chantal Oakes, Irenosen Okojie, Koye Oyedeji, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Jeda Pearl, Aisha Phoenix, Akila Richards, Ioney Smallhorne and Gemma Weekes.
Editor: Leone Ross' latest novel is the New York Times’ Editor’s Choice This One Sky Day/Popisho (Faber/FSG, 2021). Described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a master of detail’, her fiction has been nominated for the Women’s Prize, the Goldsmiths award, the RSL Ondjaate award, and the Edge Hill Prize, among others.
Foreword: Dr. Reynaldo Anderson is an Associate Professor at Temple University in Africology and African American Studies, and the executive director and co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM).
Series Editor: Kadija Sesay is the Publications Manager for Inscribe, a professional writers development programme.
Cover artwork: Ronnie McGrath.
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Ask an Agent or Editor at Huddersfield Lit Fest
Saturday 25 March, 2-3pm
Price: FREE (but donations welcome)
Venue: Cellar Theatre, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Queen Street, Huddersfield HD1 2SP
Book online
What are the roles of an agent and editor? How do you write a good covering letter and synopsis? What fees do agents take and how do authors’ advances work?
Whether you have a book ready to submit or are just starting out on your writing journey, our expert panel will be able to offer you invaluable tips on the publishing process.
About the panellists
Aliya Gulamani is an award-winning Commissioning Editor at Unbound and Editorial Lead for Unbound Firsts – a new imprint for debut writers of colour
Rachel Mann is an agent at Jo Unwin Literary Agency who0 was previously global publishing director for the Roald Dahl Story Company.
Daisy Watt is a Commissioning Editor at Harper North, championing northern voices and gripping, original fiction across reading group, crime and thriller, historical and humour.
Chair: Adam Lowe is a writer, performer, publisher, and the UK’s LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate. His debut collection Patterflash will be published by Peepal Tree in June.
This is a hybrid event which can be attended in person or online. Select General Admission or e-ticket at checkout, and a link for online access will be sent to you the day before the event.
This event will also be BSL interpreted and will have live subtitling.
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Polari Literary Salon at Huddersfield Lit Fest
Saturday 25 March, 7-8.45pm
Price: Early bird (before 15 February): £5 (£3 conc) / Standard: £7 (£5 conc) / carers free
Venue: Small Seeds (under Bar Maroc), corner of Castlegate/New Street, Huddersfield HD1 2UD
Book online
Enjoy readings from a rich and exciting range of LGBT+ writing talent. Polari is hosted by author and journalist Paul Burston, with performances from Peepal Tree poet Adam Lowe, T.S. Eliot Prize-winner Joelle Taylor and painter-poet Will Belshah.
Adam will be previewing poems from his debut collection, Patterflash. We expect a small number of exclusive advance copies to be available at the event.
About Polari Literary Salon
“Always fun, always thought-provoking – a guaranteed great night out” Sarah Waters
Founded by author and journalist Paul Burston in a bar in Soho in 2007, award-winning literary salon Polari showcases and celebrates the best in LGBTQ+ poetry and writing.
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Praise for Adam Lowe
‘The magnificence of this stilettoed, melt-on-you-like-molten-butter poem is its crystalline vagueness. It dances on points of suspension, smears fuck-you messages in lipstick on vanity mirrors, and asks you to fill in the blanks.’ Shivanee Ramlochan, Novel Niche
‘...these shimmering lines are a burst of bling, in a classical shell. For all that joy, there is a restlessness within the verse, a wrestling with borders and a lust for connection. Smart poems, they exult and glow.’ Peter Kalu, The Commonword Review
‘Adam Lowe also merges the then with the now, reworking Sappho, stories from the Bible and Babylon seamlessly, in subversive narratives, claiming them as personal and political points of protest.’ Sohini Basak, Sabotage Reviews
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Patterflash embraces the performative, self-ironising aesthetic of campness but, as a mask, it is a complex and very malleable one, capable of showing features of tenderness, bravery, righteous anger and sometimes sadness and alarm – as well as the comedic.
Within a collection that displays an engaging variety of language registers, both ‘high’ and ‘low’ in tone, the masking sometimes makes use of Polari, the gay street language that simultaneously reveals and conceals, excludes and invites, estranges and makes familiar.
The collection connects the poet as a wry, humane observer of the scene, particularly as conducted in Manchester, and the persona of “Adam Lowe” as both actor in and narrator of his own dramas, who performs, exults and sometimes suffers in a wide range of guises and disguises.
What unites them is the urge to embrace the possibilities of being exactly who you want to be whatever the complications or consequences of your choice. From the four-year-old boy who, though always easy in his mixedness of race, also wants to wear a blonde woman’s wig without any angst of self-contradiction, through the poems delighting in the frank physicality of gay sex, to the mature man experiencing domestic contentment, Adam Lowe takes us on a journey rich in observation and always in a poetry that makes an art of patterflash.
Photography and front cover design by Lee Baxter | baxterphoto.co.uk.
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You Have You Father Hard Head
by Colin Robinson
You Have You Father Hard Head represents a nuanced but unswerving engagement with desire and intimacy as the late Colin Robinson explores what it means to be a Caribbean son negotiating the complexities of relationships between men.
FFind out more and buy the book now
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Reader, I married him & other queer goings-on
by Dorothea Smartt
From the first poem to the last, Dorothea Smartt’s latest chapbook advocates a revolutionary decampment from the madhouse of desires “reigned in” to protect a precarious and often incoherent code of Caribbean respectability. This is Smartt at her sensual and lyrical best.
Find out more and buy the book now
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Archipelagos at UWI, Mona Campus
Wednesday 29 March, 5-6.30pm
Price: FREE | Venue: The UWI Library Multi-functional Room / YouTube.com
Book online / enquire
Join us on 29 March for the official launch of Geoffrey Philp's newest collection of poetry, Archipelagos.
You can attend live in person at the he UWI Library Multifunctional Room or you can watch the livestream on YouTube.
In either case, please email the Department of Literatures in English to book a space and/or receive the livestream link.
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Praise for Geoffrey Philp
‘Archipelagos is a book that gets under the diseased skin of history’s oppressors, and the disconcerting quiet fallout of disaster. It doesn’t sound like fun but the effect on the reader is incredibly liberating, putting them in an omniscient point of view that brings within them an understanding of the world’s ebb and flow, history, damage and healing. This may well be the book that Geoffrey Philp is remembered by. Get it.’ Roger Robinson
‘Philp weaves dialect and landscape into his lines with subtle authority. It is easy to get caught up in the content and miss the grace of his technique’ Carrol Fleming, The Caribbean Writer
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Archipelagos collects poetry written in the time of onrushing global disaster, of a racist and still imperial USA and of Black lives matter. It is a call to arms that opens out the struggle for human survival in the epoch of the Anthropocene to remind us that this began not just in the factories of Europe but in the holds of the slave ships and plantations of the Caribbean.
No natural world was more changed than the West Indian islands by sugar monoculture – and, as the title poem begins: “At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise/ and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean”. Historically, “the debris of empire that crowd our shores” connects to the “sands of our beaches / littered with masks and plastic bottles.”
Geoffrey Philp’s powerful and elegant poems span past and present and make it very clear that there cannot be a moral response to the climate crisis that is not also embedded in the struggle for social justice, for overcoming the malignancies of empire and colonialism and the power of global capitalism – the missions of the West that always had and still have at their heart the ideology of white supremacy and a capitalism endlessly voracious for the world’s human and natural resources.
These are poems of wit and anger, but also of personal intimacy – dealing with the vexed relationship with a violent father – and give us line after line of the shapeliest poetry – in sound, in rhythm and the exact choice of word.
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Daylight Come
by Diana McCaulay
Diana McCaulay takes the reader on a tense, threat-filled odyssey as mother and daughter attempt their escape from scorching daylight. On the way, they must learn much about the nature of self-sacrifice, maternal love and the dreadful moral choices that must be made in the cause of self-protection.
Find out more and buy the book now
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Fossil
Fossil explores the impact of human activity on climate change though a post-colonial lens and from the perspective of all life on earth including plants, creatures, elements and inanimate objects. The collection takes its subject seriously through a playful testing of language.
Find out more and buy the book now
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Garveyism in the 21st Century:
Climate Change
Thursday 30 March, 6-7.45pm
Price: FREE | Venue: The UWI Library Multi-functional Room / YouTube.com
Book online / enquire
Join us on 30 March for the 16th Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture by Geoffrey Philp.
You can attend live in person at the he UWI Library Multifunctional Room or you can watch the livestream on YouTube.
In either case, please email the Department of Literatures in English to book a space and/or receive the livestream link.
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