Dead [Women] Poets Society Seance: Joelle Taylor, Mary Jean Chan

Winchester Poetry Festival 2025

Dead [Women] Poets Society Seance: Joelle Taylor, Mary Jean Chan

An exclusive séance celebrating 10 years of Dead [Women] Poets Society, featuring two of the starriest, spookiest necromancers yet: Joelle Taylor and Mary Jean Chan.

Join us as our resurrectors commune with the spirits of Adrienne Rich, the legendary lesbian poet and thinker, and Bing Xin 冰心, one of the most prolific Chinese women writers of the 20th century. We’ll hear more about their lives and works, and the influence they’ve had on our two living poets.

We’ll also be treated to brand new work by Joelle Taylor and Mary Jean Chan, haunted by the ghosts of these two dead women poets.

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry. Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), their second book, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Chan co-edited 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) and is Departmental Lecturer in Poetry on the MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford.

Joelle Taylor’s most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2022 Polari Book Prize. Her novel The Night Alphabet was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. Her collection Maryville will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025.

Dead [Women] Poets Society works with brilliant living women and non-binary writers to commune with women poets of the past. They run workshops and events celebrating our literary (great-great-) grandmothers, and host an online archive of all the writers they’ve resurrected.

Suitable for: 13yrs+, strong language and heavy themes explored.

Duration: 1.5 hours

Format: in person performance

Access: venue is wheelchair accessible throughout