This fascinating and inspiring workshop will introduce the work of key contemporary, black women poets alongside images by black women artists or of black women to explore ‘pictured blackness’. The session will include readings from a range of poets alongside images of artworks, interactive visual prompts and discussion.

Texts from a range of poets including facilitator Amanda Holiday, Lucille Clifton, Yalie Kamara, Rita Dove, Akila Richards, Harryette Mullen, Vanessa Onwuemezi will be read alongside artworks by Zanele Muholi, Virginia Chihota, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Bekis Ayon and Christian Schad among others.

Register here

Poet and filmmaker Amanda Holiday studied Fine Art before moving into film and scriptwriting, directing short experimental films for the Arts Council, BFI and Channel 4. Between 2001-2010, she lived in Cape Town where she wrote and directed several educational television series.

Her chapbook ‘The Art Poems’ was published in April 2018 as part of New Generation African Poets (Tano) Her imagined conversation with artist Donald Rodney, ‘A Posthumous Conversation about Black Art’ was published in the first edition of Critical Fish. She completed the Poetry MA at the University of East Anglia in 2019 and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner (US), South Bank Poetry Magazine, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Lolwe, ANMLY (US), CUSP feminist anthology, Frieze and amberflora magazine

In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and founded the UK’s first crowdfunded poetry press Black Sunflowers. She is currently Techne AHRC doctoral student in Poetry, Race and Art at the University of Brighton.

Header image by Kaylan Michael