Leeds Library Salon offers an evening of talks, performances, mini-lectures, and conviviality curated by Renaissance One and co-produced in partnership between The Leeds Library and Renaissance One. Doors 6pm, Event 6.30pm – 8pm
Our October session features Shivanee Ramlochan, Malika Booker, the Geraldine Connor Foundation and is chaired by Dr Emily Zobel Marshall (Leeds Beckett University)
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have ”
“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes ”
Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian writer, critic and book blogger. Her first collection of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting is published by Peepal Tree Press (2017) and was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes (2018 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection). She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books, the Book Review Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine and writes for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the Anglophone Caribbean's largest literary festival. She also writes about books at her personal blog, Novel Niche with a special emphasis on close readings of Caribbean and queer literatures. Her UK appearance is part of a book tour produced by Renaissance One www.novelniche.net @novelniche
Malika Booker is a writer, spoken word and multidisciplinary artist, whose work spans literature, education and cross-arts. Organisations she has worked with include Arts Council England, BBC, British Council, Wellcome Trust, National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Arvon, and Hampton Court Palace.
Dr Emily Zobel Marshall is a writer, researcher and lecturer whose work is informed by Postcolonial theory and spans a range of themes including constructions of identity, race and racial politics, cultural resistance and Caribbean carnival cultures. She is an expert in the role of trickster figures in the literatures and cultures of Africa and its Diaspora and has published widely in this area. Marshall is currently Course Director at the School fo Cultural Studies & Humanities at Leeds Beckett University.
The Geraldine Connor Foundation (GCF) is an arts organisation established in 2012 to continue the legacy of the renowned theatre director, educationalist and ethno-musicologist, Dr Geraldine Connor. GCF continues her legacy by creating a variety of creative projects that inspire others, be they artists, young people or communities, to experience exceptional art across diverse forms.
Tickets £5
Watch a reading by Shivanee Ramlochan
Watch Shivanee Ramlochan read three poems from her collection Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting
They say a dead woman can’t run from her coffin.
How moonshine can orchestrate nuff wild thoughts!
It’s an hour past midnight and the road outside is quiet;
my thoughts are a twisting screwdriver; licks
of a dozen switches scorch my skin. Pomegranate flowers
line the road, each spread out from the other,
and their crumpled petals are the shocking red of death.
Extract of 'Sin Visits Me' by Malika Booker
Read Malika Booker’s full poem, a Poem of The Week in The Guardian here
Watch a video of Dr Emily Zobel Marshall
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man that has nothing to lose”