AIDS Memorial Quilt Poetry Readings with Sea Sharp

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.

Sea Sharp is a Black AmeriBritican poet whose work can be found in dozens of publications, including The Guardian and Storm Cellar.

Their poem, The Tallgrass Shuffles, was awarded one of America’s most honoured literary awards, the Pushcart Prize in 2017. In the same year, their debut poetry collection, ‘The Swagger of Dorothy Gale & Other Filthy Ways to Strut’ (Ice Cube Press), won the Prairie Seed Poetry Prize. 

Sea Sharp’s second book, ‘Black Cotton’ (Waterloo Press), was published in 2019, and they were also awarded Arts Council England funding for their work-in-progress theatrical show, ‘Brother Insect’. They became an Obsidian Foundation alumnus in 2020.

In 2025, Sea Sharp was the Writer-in-Residence at Coast is Queer Literary Festival and was co-editor of both Covert Literary Magazine and the online zine, Textured. 

They mostly stay hidden somewhere near Brighton, but on special occasions they’ll sometimes pretend not to be so shy.