Here Be Dragons – A celebration of the work of James Baldwin

An event honouring the legendary writer James Baldwin in what would have been his 100th birthday year. In a conversation that centre’s Baldwin’s queer writing, Douglas Field (A Historical Guide to James Baldwin, Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me), Mendez (The Queer Bible: A Love Letter to James Baldwin, Rainbow Milk) and writer/film director Campbell X (Stud Life) will celebrate Baldwin’s extraordinary courage, his confidence in his own mind and his enduring legacy.  This event will include readings of James Baldwins’ work and panellists’ reflections on the impact he has had on their own lives.

The reader for this event will be the poet/performer Sea Sharp (Black Cotton).   

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Douglas Field is professor of American Literature at the University of Manchester. He is a founding editor of the journal James Baldwin Review and the author of three books on James Baldwin. Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, my father, and me will be published in November. His work has been published in the Guardian, Literary Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, where he is a regular contributor.

Mendez is a London-based Jamaican-British writer. They were born in 1982 in the Black Country, a historically industrial region in the English West Midlands. Raised within the Jehovah’s faith, Mendez left the organisation while still a teenager. Upon receiving a manuscript of autobiographical fragments, Dialogue Books publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove (UK) challenged Mendez to find the fiction in their story, and the resulting novel, RAINBOW MILK, was published to rave reviews during the 2020 lockdown. RAINBOW MILK was named one of the Observer's Top Ten Best Debuts for 2020. It was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Polari Prize, in the Fiction Debut category of the British Book Awards, and for the LAMBDA Literary Award in Gay Fiction. Mendez is currently adapting the novel for a TV series.

​Mendez is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and has also written for British Vogue, The Face, Attitude, Esquire, Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Foundation, the Guardian and the Brixton Review of Books. They are working on their second novel.

Campbell X‘s work deals with queer memory, messiness, desire and Blackness across the African diaspora.

He directed the award-winning queer urban romantic comedy feature film STUD LIFE which was voted by the Guardian as one of the top 10 Black British feature films ever made. Stud Life is in the MASC Collection of Criterion Channel curated by writer-archivist-filmmaker Jenni Olson and critic Caden Mark Gardner. Campbell’s latest film Still We Thrive about Black joy and resistance, is now screening globally in film festivals. He directed and produced the short film DES!RE about joy and sensuality for men (trans and non-binary) and masculine women ie studs/butches and the documentary VISIBLE about reclaiming QTBIPOC UK history.

Campbell is currently in post-production on his second feature Low Rider, a Black queer road trip, which was filmed in the Western Cape region of South Africa starring Emma Mcdonald and Thishiwe Ziqubu.

Campbell also writes and directs theatre and was one of the writers at the Royal Court for My White Best Friend theatre series.

He Co-directed Talking About A Revolution with Chinonyerem Odimba for Taita Fhodzi at the Pump House, Lyric Hammersmith and Bristol Old Vic.
Campbell wrote TOXIC about Black manhood for Fuel Theatre’s When All Is Said curated by Travis Alabanza which highlights the work of Black UK trans writers.

Website https://linktr.ee/campbellx YouTube link https://www.youtube.com/user/BlackmanVision Twitter https://twitter.com/CampbellX Instagram https://www.instagram.com/campbellx/

Sea Sharp is a British-American poet, performer, and playwright whose work explores themes of home, trauma, identity and anything else that makes them feel uncomfortable. They are the author of Black Cotton (Waterloo Press, 2019) and of the Prairie Seed Poetry Prize winning book, The Swagger of Dorothy Gale & Other Filthy Ways to Strut (Ice Cube Press, 2017). Sharp’s poem The Tallgrass Shuffles was selected for The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses XLI (2017) and since 2014, their work has been published in 25 magazines, anthologies, and presses including Polychrome Ink, Crab Fat Magazine and The Guardian.