In Conversation: The Undercurrent of Class on Queer Lives and Poetry

Literary Agent Abi Fellows and poet Joelle Taylor will be in conversation to discuss the intersection between class and queer identity in literature.

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who prior to the pandemic completed a world tour with her collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of 4 collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of inter-connecting short stories The Night Alphabet.

Her new poetry collection C+NTO & Othered Poems was published in June 2021 and is the subject of the Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. C+nto has been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2021, been named by The Telegraph, the New Statesman, The White Review & Times Literary Supplement as one of the best poetry books of 2021, as well as DIVA magazine’s Book of the Month, and awarded 5 stars by the Morning Star. She has received a Changemaker Award from the Southbank Centre, a Fellowship of the RSA, and her poem Valentine was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. She is a co-curator and host of Out- Spoken Live, the UK’s premier poetry and music club currently resident at the Southbank Centre. She is the commissioning editor at Out-Spoken Press 2020-2022.

Abi Fellows is a literary agent with over 20 years’ experience in the publishing industry, having started in bookselling at Blackwell’s in 2001. After a stint on the sales team of Faber and Faber, Abi began her agenting career with Georgina Capel Associates, spent several years as a literary scout at RR Ltd and returned to agenting at The Good Literary Agency, building a list focused on amplifying and championing writers from backgrounds that had traditionally been marginalised. In 2023, Abi joined DHH Literary Agency. She represents a number of queer, working class writers including  Eva Verde, Jon Ransom, Michael Handrick and Juno Roche.

This event will be BSL interpreted.