AIDS Memorial Quilt Poetry Readings with Maria Jastrzębska

40 individual panels of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display through the festival and will be free to visit throughout the Festival.

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt commemorates more than 550 people lost to HIV and AIDS across the UK. Part of the world’s largest community art project, launched in the USA in 1985 by activist Cleve Jones, the UK Quilt was established in the late 1980s through the efforts of Scottish activist Alastair Hume. Comprising 333 handmade panels, each created by someone who loved the person it honours, the Quilt is both a powerful memorial and an enduring act of activism, ensuring those lost to HIV and AIDS are remembered and never forgotten. 

We have invited six poets to read their work, and recite the names of the 60 names of the people who are represented on the Quilt display.

Polish-born poet Maria Jastrzębska is the author of five collections, most recently Small Oddyseys (Waterloo Press). She translated Justyna Bargielska’s selected poems The Great Plan B (Smokestack Press). Her own work is translated into Polish and Romanian and is widely anthologised, recently in Up/Roar Poems of Queer Resistance (Arachne Press) and Woman, Mapped (Rebecca Swift/Fly on the Wall Press), as well as being archived in the British Library’s Poetry and Translation project. She co-edited Queer in Brighton (New Writing South). She teaches in diverse settings and has been involved in many art and community projects, including ACE awarded Snow Q cross-arts project with Lewes Live Literature, Speaking Solidarity anti- bullying of LGBTQ+ students initiative with Sussex University and What We Leave We Carry Writers Mosaic migrant voices project by Colin Grant with Jonathan Cape this year. Currently she is writing a memoir and a new poetry collection is forthcoming in 2028.

www.mariajastrzebska.com