Panel: Genre-Bending and Queering Words

This lively event poses the question: What exactly is poetry? As queer writers do we kick against genre restrictions as well as challenging gender norms? Are we drawn to bending rules? Do we play by questioning tradition, creating hybrid forms to voice our queer natures?

Janet Sutherland, Robert Hamberger and Maria Jastrzębska’s latest works encompass memoir, travelogue, film-poems, family history, Ponglish, phonetics, sonnets, prose poems, Serbia, Poland, lesbian cowboys…and John Clare. They will read from these works and in conversation with each other will dig deeper into what provokes them when they’re writing. They will be asking what the role of queer writers is in a world where queerness is increasingly being erased, and how politics, identity and experience can inform what is created. Discover what queer writers and readers can learn from the risks these three writers are taking, and why queer writers don’t always tell it straight. This event will include a short film and Q&A.

Janet Sutherland grew up on a dairy farm, she is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Messenger House (Shearsman Books, 2023). Her previous collections all from Shearsman are Home Farm (2019), Bone Monkey (2014), Hangman’s Acre (2009) and Burning the Heartwood (2006). The Messenger House, a hybrid collection, is about her great-great-grandfather’s travels to Serbia in the 1840’s with his friend Mr Gutch, a Queen’s Messenger. Her poems are widely anthologised and published in magazines such as New Statesman, The Spectator and The North.  A critical essay on the poet Charles Reznikoff appeared as an afterword to two new editions of his work, Holocaust, in the UK (Five Leaves Publishing, 2009) and USA (Black Sparrow Press, 2007). She won the 2017 Kent and Sussex Poetry Prize and received a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2018.  She has an MA in American Poetry and lives in Lewes, East Sussex. www.janetsutherland.co.uk

Poet, editor and translator, Maria Jastrzębska was born in Poland and came to the UK as a child. She was the co-editor of Queer in Brighton (New Writing South 2014). Her most recent collections are Small Odysseys (Waterloo Press 2022) and The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue (Cinnamon Press/Liquorice Fish 2018). She was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize in 2019 and her work is widely anthologised including Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe 2015), Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press 2018), Ukraine in the work of International Poets (Poezja Londyn 2022) and The Transformative Power of Tattoo (Guts Publishing 2023). The Cedars of Walpole Park, her selected poems were translated and published in Poland (Stoważyszenie Żywych Poetów 2015). She was the writer for the ACE- awarded collaborative cross-arts project Snow Q and filmpoems of her work have been screened internationally. She translated the work of Polish writer Justyna Bargielska and co-translated Slovenian writer Iztok Osojnik. She has taught creative writing to community and women’s groups, refugees, LGBTQ+ projects, students and the Poetry School.

Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes, appearing in the Forward Book of Poetry 2020. He has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and won The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023. His poetry has featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His website is www.roberthamberger.co.uk