Please join Poets & Players on Saturday 22 April 2023, 2.30-4.00 at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for a wonderful line-up of poets and musicians. The event is free and everyone is welcome. Read all about the poets and musicians below.

---

Katrina Naomi

Katrina is an award-winning poet, performer, mentor and judge. Her poetry collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and a Saboteur Award, and she is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize. Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Poetry Please, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation.

---

Nick Makoha

Nick Makoha is the founder of The Obsidian Foundation. Winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz prize and the Poetry London Prize. In 2017, Nick’s debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year. Nick is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and the Complete Works alumnus. He has been writer-in-residence for the ICA London and Wordsworth Trust. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. His play The Dark —produced by Fuel Theatre and directed by JMK award-winner Roy Alexander— was on a national tour in 2019. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Alfred Fagon Award and won the 2021 Columbia International Play Reading prize. His poems have appeared in the Cambridge Review, the New York Times, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Poetry London, TriQuarterly Review, 5 Dials, Boston Review, Callaloo and Wasafiri. He is a Trustee for the Arvon Foundation and the Ministry of Stories, and a member of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen collective.

---

Sammy Weaver

Sammy Weaver is a poet from Hay-on-Wye, currently based in West Yorkshire. Her debut pamphlet, Angola, America (Seren), won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize 2021. Her poems have appeared in The Moth, The Irish Times, Mslexia, The Island Review and Anthropocene, and have been anthologised widely. In 2020, she won The Moth Magazine’s Nature Writing competition. In 2021, she was shortlisted for a Northern Writers’ Award for poetry and Nine Arches Press’ Primers scheme. She has a Creative Writing MA from Manchester Metropolitan University.

---

Chris Davies & Rachael Gladwin

Chris Davies is a Musician, Composer, Performer, Buddhist, Hairdresser and Oudist with over thirty years experience working in the Arts, mainly with visual theatre and dance. His current projects are composing music and performing in a new adaptation of the 12th century Sufi poem ‘The Conference of Birds’ by Farid ud-Din Attar; he continues to perform live accompaniment for the first full length animated film ever made ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’, with a play called ‘Spring Reign’ about the situation in Aleppo, Syria; he is saxophonist/raver with Mr Wilson’s Second Liners who play early 90’s dance classics in the style of a New Orleans Brass Band, a few haircuts, transforming the mind through Buddhist study and practice, and sound technician for Poets and Players.

Rachael Gladwin is a musician, composer, actor and puppeteer. She specialises in creating beautiful musical scores that integrate with
theatre pieces and visual stories, using harp, vocals and percussion as well as other instruments and electronic effects.

Katrina Naomi photo credit: Francesca Ausenda