my river will carve a starward path

Join us for an evening of poetry and performance that follows waters, intervenes in colonial archives, and reimagines ancestral and ecological futures. We are delighted to host three brilliant poets: Elfie Shiosaki, Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal, and J. R. Carpenter.

Dr Elfie Shiosaki is a First Nations (Noongar and Yawuru) storyteller and academic from Western Australia, leading community education about human rights through her award-winning Indigenous storytelling practices. She is the Director of the Centre for Indigenous Policy Research at the Australian National University and member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). She is the author of Refugia (2024) and Homecoming (2021) and co-editor of maar bidi: next generation black writing (2020). She was the inaugural Editor of First Nations Writing at Westerly magazine.

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal is a writer and literary translator, born in Palampur, India. She is the author of The Yak Dilemma (Makina Books, 2021). Upcoming works include a limited-edition pamphlet of plague poems called Bitter Almonds, currently in production with Salvage Press, Dublin. Supriya is currently based in Manchester, where she is working towards a practice-based PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Place Writing. Her research, funded by AHRC’s regional consortium NWCDTP, explores reservoirs as engineered ecologies shaped by memories of displacement, control, and transformation.

J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and researcher working on questions of place, displacement, migration, colonialism, and climate, across performance, print, and digital media. Her digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Her print collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2018. This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2020. The Pleasure of the Coast was published by Pamenar Press in 2023, and her most recent collection Measure of Weather was published by Shearsman in 2025. She is a Lecturer in Performance Writing at University of Leeds.

Event details

This event is free and open to all. After the performances, there will be drinks and refreshments (including vegetarian/vegan food), and time for conversation.

Accessibility

BLOC is wheelchair-accessible, has a hearing loop installed, and has low lighting and muted colours for neurodivergent people. There is an accessible toilet with a hoist installed. For more accessibility information, visit: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/bloc/access/.

This event is hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Writing in the School of the Arts, Queen Mary University of London.