The Live Poetry Book Club

Welcome to The Live Poetry Book Club, a morning summer book club exploring and celebrating live readings from black + mixed heritage writers, curated and hosted by writer Rebecca Tantony.

For those who love nothing more than reading a good book (ones that move us and inspire us and allow us to see the world differently) and for those who adore listening to a writer bring their work into being through performance, at each of these unique events we will listen to the poet read their work in person, then take their collections home to enjoy afterwards.

30th August we welcome Salena Godden. Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage based in London. Her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death was published by Canongate, it won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize.

A hardback edition of Pessimism is for Lightweights - 30 pieces of courage and resistance was published by Rough Trade Books in 2023. The title poem is on permanent display at The Peoples History Museum in Manchester. A new full poetry collection With Love, Grief and Fury and literary childhood memoir Springfield Road - A Poets Childhood Revisited were published with Canongate in 2024.

Salena Godden has grown to become one of Britain’s foremost poets whose electrifying live performances have earned her a devoted following. Her work has been widely anthologised and broadcast on BBC radio, TV and film. Her work has beenshortlisted for the 4thWrite Short Story Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, Jerwood Compton Foundation, Bridport Poetry Prize and highly commended by the Forward Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.

Salena is currently working on The Life Of Life a second novel set in the Mrs Death Misses Death universe, it will be published by Canongate in 2026.

We will also be joined by Panther Panther! Pablo Villierezz, an audio-visual artist living in Bristol, of dual Mexican and British citizenship. He creates a hybrid brand of tropical bass (a fusion of Latin music with Bass Culture),using analogue and digital machines, mixing traditional Latin styles such as cumbia, bolero and merengue with more contemporary digital forms such as moombahton, dembow and baile funk, embedded in Western pop influences found in electronica, techno, drum and bass and more experimental sounds.

His music lives in an imaginary place somewhere between Bristol and the Pacific Coast. His live, electronic or audio-visual performances are expanded, psychedelic trips submerged in colour and Mexican-influenced patterns, animated digitally or using found footage and performed Live. Over the past few years, he has hosted ritual spaces for considering our relationship with death within a Dia de los Muertos tradition and imagery. Using both music machines and Mexican folk instrumentation, he creates otherworldly atmospheres for deep reflection and inner voyages whilst the hips sway. Pablo is also an academic and lecturer at Bath Spa University on the Creative Sound and Production degree course, specialising in Live Visuals and Post-Colonial readings of electronic music.

10:30 am-12:00 pm, MMI St Agnes. You can book now via the ticket link on this page.

So come, one and all, join us at the MMI St Agnes for this final very special morning of language.

Tickets are just £5 and include a free poetry book of the writer's work and free refreshments.

Concessions available, no questions asked, just reach out

Children and babies welcome, but please be aware content won't be censored and may not be age appropriate.

Made possible through Arts Council Uk and Emblaze

EMBLAZE (@EMBLAZEUK) / XEmblaze (@emblaze.uk) • Instagram photos and videosemblazeuk (@emblazeuk) | TikTok

https://soundcloud.com/pantherpanther