Poets for the Planet are delighted to be performing at Bankside Open Spaces Festival on Saturday 10 June.
Join us at 2pm on the Red Cross Garden Stage (Red Cross Garden, 50 Redcross Way, London, SE1 1HA) for an ecopoetry showcase featuring Khairani Barokka, Amy McAllister, Robin Lamboll, Claire Collison, and others, and hosted by Jessica Taggart Rose.
Khairani Barokka is a Minang-Javanese writer and artist, and Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her work has been presented widely internationally, and aims to centre disability justice as anticolonial praxis. She is currently shortlisted for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Awards, in the Arts and Culture Category. Okka’s latest book, Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), which highlights the colonial roots of environmental crises, was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.
Amy McAllister is a spoken word artist from Dublin, Ireland. She has won numerous poetry slams including the UK Anti-Slam, the Hammer & Tongue London Slam Championship, the UK Team Slam Finals at the Royal Albert Hall and the Great Northern Slam. Her debut collection Are You As Single As That Cream? is published by Burning Eye. Amy has been poet-in-residence for Transport for London and at Bang Said the Gun, was selected to read from the restored manuscript of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel at the Royal Festival Hall alongside Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes, and her poetry is featured in Rhyming Thunder, South Bank Poetry Magazine, and the Pop Up Anthology.
Amy is also an actress and credits include: A Discovery of Witches (Sky), There She Goes (BBC), Witless (BBC), Call the Midwife (BBC), Philomena (Pathe/Canal+), Scorch (Soho Theatre and International Tour), Diamond (Bush Theatre/BBC Arts), Hecuba (RSC), and Sons Without Fathers (Arcola).
Robin Lamboll is a climate scientist and poet. They were UK Poetry Slam Champion 2019 and came second in the World Cup of Poetry that year. They have performed as part of Earthsong for COP26, BAIT: Beyond an Inconvenient Truth for Earth Day 2023 and at poetry events across the world. A physicist studying climate change, based at Imperial College, Robin’s PhD was in the physics of solar cells.
Claire Collison is a writer, artist and educator, whose work spans photography, poetry, performance, installation, and participatory events. She was Women Poets’ Prize winner 2018 and won the Big Draw Festival Prize, 2019. She has worked with partners including Kettle’s Yard, Waltham Forest Borough of Culture, the Government Art Collection and the Cultural Institute at King’s College London. She has facilitated projects for the Croydon Refugee Heritage Project, Thames Festival, and Rivers of the World. In 2021 she designed a Summer of Play for National Maritime Museum. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet. Her poetry has been placed in Resurgence, Hippocrates, and Winchester Poetry Prizes. Her debut pamphlet, Placebo is published by Blueprint.
Simeon Farrar is an artist and fashion designer and writes some poems in his spare time. His fashion brand Black Score is a place where his love of words, music, popular culture and social justice all collide. He was one of a few poets to appear in the BAFTA award winning Life And Rhymes show on Sky Arts and has featured at many of the leading spoken word events around London.
Kid Anansi is the poetic equivalent of finding out that the drinks machine in your local McDonalds has quietly replaced its Pepsi button with spiced rum. He’s confusing, frightening, delicious with ginger ale and lemon, and unhealthy in large doses. His poetry will either have you laughing, crying, biting your knuckles in second-hand embarrassment, or all three, mixing history and melancholy with slapstick humour and inimitable energy. A regular face on the BAFTA Award winning first season of Life & Rhymes, and a host of multiple poetry nights around London.
“He’s that creative hurricane!” Benjamin Zephaniah.