Queers Read This

 

‘Queers Read This is a literature event that isn't boring.’

 

Readings and performance by Richard Porter, Abondance Matanda, Nisha Ramayya, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh, and music by Charlie Porter.

 

Presented by artist Richard Porter and writer Isabel Waidner, this reading event features various texts working across intersectional systems of oppression, formal distinctions between prose and poetry or critical and creative, and other associated disciplines of art, performance, literature and film. Readings contain themes of queer joy (Porter), black homes as art galleries (Matanda), states of the body produced by love (Ramayya), magpies and swallows (Thornton), gaudy baubles (Waidner) and the wish to be loved by someone that isn't capitalism (Walsh). 

 

This event celebrates the dual launch of Over there, a queer anthology of joy (Pilot Press, 2018) and Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). 

 

The title Queers Read This is gratefully borrowed from an anonymously published leaflet distributed at pride march in New York, June 1990.

 

Abondance Matanda is a hood feminist poet and arts and culture writer. Observations and lived experiences in London, her home city, inform the subversive, colloquial voice she uses to explore girlhood, blackness, memory and power.

 

Richard Porter is an artist currently studying on the MFA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, University of London. He founded Pilot Press in 2017 and his publications Not here. A queer anthology of loneliness and Over there. A queer anthology of joy, are available in Tenderbooks and Donlon Books in London, and Printed Matter, Mast Books and McNally Jackson Books in New York City.

 

Charlie Porter is men’s fashion critic for the The Financial Times. He also co-runs the queer rave Chapter 10.

 

Nisha Ramayya's pamphlets Notes on Sanskrit (2015) and Correspondences (2016) are published by Oystercatcher Press. She co-authored Threads (2018) with Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil, a creative-critical pamphlet published by Clinic. Ramayya’s work is available online in The Believer, Blackbox Manifold and The White Review. She is a member of the research group Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK.

 

Timothy Thornton is a writer, composer and performer. He makes queer stuff about ghosts, foxes, birds and the sea, and lives in Brighton.

 

Isabel Waidner is a writer and cultural theorist. Her books include Gaudy Bauble (2017) and Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (ed., 2018), both published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Waidner's articles and short fictions have appeared in journals including 3:AM Magazine, Berfrois, Configurations, The Happy Hypocrite, The Quietus and minor literature[s]. As part of the indie band Klang, Waidner released records on UK labels Rough Trade and Blast First. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Roehampton, London. 

 

Joanna Walsh is the author of seven books. The most recent, Break.up (2018), was published by Semiotext(e) in the US and Tuskar Rock Press in the UK. Her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Granta and the Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2015. She edits online literary journals 3:AM Magazine and Catapult, writes criticism for publications including The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian and founded the Twitter handle @read_women. In 2017, Walsh was nominated to be an UK Arts Foundation Fellow for Literature and the Burgess Fellow in 2018 at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester.