Streaming live from Drake the Bookshop, join us on Zoom for a multimedia event of poetry readings, film, live origami and Q&A, to celebrate Kirsten Luckins' new book.

Poetry from KIRSTEN LUCKINS, JO COLLEY, CLAIRE TRÉVIEN, JANE LOVELL and special guests, with origami by ELLIE CLEWLOW in response to the poetry

KIRSTEN LUCKINS is a poet, performer, and spoken word theatre-maker based on the north-east coast of England. Her creative practice is eclectic, multi-artform and collaborative, with an emphasis on compassion and playfulness. She has toured two award-nominated spoken word shows, and is a director, dramaturg and creative producer. She is artistic director of the Tees Women Poets collective, and co-founder of the Celebrating Change digital storytelling project, where she teaches creative memoir writing. Passerine is her third collection.

JO COLLEY is a writer and digital learning designer who lives in Darlington. She has worked as a poet and prose writer with Tees Valley Arts and New Writing North, running creative writing sessions with people of all ages and backgrounds. Her collections are Sleeper, Bones of Birds (Smokestack), As If (Vane Women), Punchdrunk (Ek Zuban) and Weeping for the Lovely Phantoms (Salt).

CLAIRE TRÉVIEN has performed her work internationally, from South Africa to New Orleans. She is the author of the pamphlet Low-Tide Lottery (Salt, 2011), and two collections The Shipwrecked House (Penned in the Margins, 2013), Astéronymes (Penned in the Margins, 2016), and Brain Fugue (Verve Poetry Press, 2019). The Shipwrecked House was longlisted in the Guardian First Book Award, highly commended in the Forward Prizes, and co-commissioned as a one-woman show by Ledbury Festival.

JANE LOVELL is an award-winning poet whose work focuses on our relationship with the planet and its wildlife. She has won the Flambard Prize (2015), the Wigtown Poetry Prize (2018) and the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize (2020), has been shortlisted for several other literary awards including the Basil Bunting Prize, the Robert Graves Prize and Periplum Book Award, and has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

About Passerine:

‘Like all great experimenters, Kirsten Luckins is freed rather than bound by self-imposed restrictions. Passerine’s an elegy not just to a lost friend but to a world that is rapidly disappearing around us – one of the most dazzling collections I’ve read in a long time.’ Claire Trévien

‘Every element of the book expresses passion and vivacity, endurance in the face of the unendurable: a strong dose of medicine for our troubled times.’ Linda France

‘This is a remarkable collection that establishes Luckins as a poet that can speak to your soul.’ Jane Lovell

Full details: https://badbettypress.com/product/passerine-kirsten-luckins/

About Bad Betty Press:

We're an independent publisher of new poetry, run by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. We love writing that is bad (in the Foxy Brown sense) and beautiful (‘a Betty’ in 90s slang). We love the strange, raw and risk-taking. We believe strongly in art’s capacity to challenge its own definition, to curve away from the norm, making space for more and varied voices.