Re-Enchant: Out-Spoken Press Takeover - Workshop, Discussion & Performance

Out-Spoken Press Takeover | Workshop | Panel discussion & Performance

Sunday 12 May 

5:00pm. Image Making Meaning Making: a workshop with Anthony Anaxagorou

Join award-winning poet Anthony Anaxagorou for a workshop looking at how poems can communicate to readers just by use of image, metaphor and discursive sequencing.

7:00pm Poetry/Class: a panel discussion and performance focusing on working class poets

Join Rachael Allen, Fran Lock and lisa luxx for a panel discussion around class in poetry. Poets from working class backgrounds are producing some of the most exciting poetry in the sector yet still face many challenges and barriers to pursuing a life in poetry - from making ends meet to bias from middle class publishing and limiting pre-conceptions as to what “working class art” can and should be.

The conversation will be moderated by poet and Out-Spoken Press editor Anthony Anaxagorou, and will be followed by poetry performances by lisa minerva luxx, Fran Lock and Rachel Allen.

lisa minerva luxx is a poet, playwright, essayist and political activist of British Syrian heritage. Their work is broadcast on Channel 4, BBC Radio 4 and TEDx. Their poetry and essays are published worldwide, in anthologies and literary journals including by Penguin Books and New England Review. As playwright and director they are behind the following theatre shows: Eating the Copple Apple, what the dog said to the harvest and The Moon is Listening from Dawn til Dusk. Their debut poetry collection, Fetch Your Mother's Heart (Out-Spoken Press, 2021), was longlisted for the Polari Prize for LGBTQ+ Literature Best First Book prize. In 2024, their short story collection Sun Son will be released by Comma Press. luxx guest lectures on revolutionary poetics and queer theory, and works as a lyricist with LA-based Maison Arts. They are also a long-time transnational community organiser, having co-founded both eLaa Beirut and Nehna Hone. They believe in mutual aid and direct action as means of liberation.

Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of numerous chapbooks and thirteen poetry collections, most recently Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, and ‘a disgusting lie’: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). Her latest book is Vulgar Errors/Feral Subjects, a collection of lyric essays exploring otherness through the lens of the ‘feral’. White/ Other (The 87 Press, 2022), a collection of hybrid lyric riff, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary. Fran’s other work includes the chapbook Forever Alive (Dare-Gale Press, 2022), and the critically acclaimed work of ‘queer mourning’ Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (Pamenar Press, 2021).
Fran is Commissioning Editor at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters, where she most recently edited the mammoth anthology The Cry of the Poor (2021). She is a member of the new Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. Fran teaches online for Poetry School, and she is the co-host of the cross-cultural poetry podcast Social yet Distanced with her cousin Jack Varnell. Fran is a super proud pit bull parent. She lives in Kent.

Rachael Allen’s first collection of poems, Kingdomland, is published by Faber & Faber and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She is the co-author of a number of collaborative artists’ books, including Nights of Poor Sleep with Marie Jacotey, and Almost One. Say Again! with JocJonJosch. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory award and New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse award, and was a Burgess Fellow at The University of Manchester. She is the poetry editor for Granta magazine and Granta Books, and writes on poetry and visual art for TANK magazine, Art Review, Art Agenda, and others. Her second collection of poems, God Complex, was published by Faber & Faber in 2024.

Anthony Anaxagorou - Editor, Out-Spoken Press - Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022. His second collection, After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.