Launching Origins of the Fire Emoji: Focus on Dead Women Poets

Follow this link to join us from 7pm GMT on 30 October 2020. 

This summer, Dead [Women] Poets Society guest-edited Modern Poetry in Translation, with a focus on dead women poets. We are so excited to be launching this unique issue, titled Origins of the Fire Emoji 🔥 The poets featured in the issue span four millennia and several continents - you'll find poems in here that make you laugh out loud and poems that will move you deeply. The brilliant thing about MPT is that each poet is introduced by the translator, meaning that each of these dead women poets is 'resurrected' in some way. We can't wait to share the issue with you.

We’ll be streaming live from MPT's YouTube channel from 7pm GMT 30 October 2020, where MPT Editor Clare Pollard will be joined remotely by Dead [Women] Poets Society's Helen Bowell and Jasmine Simms. We'll welcome Zoë Brigley, Natalie Linh Bolderston and Jessica Wood, three fierce and fiery translators featured in the focus, who will be sharing work by medieval Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain, Vietnamese poet Hồ Xuân Hương and Ancient Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna (who also happens to be the first poet whose name is recorded in all of human history - yeah, we know). This launch will work like a Dead [Women] Poets Society séance, so get ready to resurrect the spirits of the dead and hear how our translator-mediums have communed with these ghostly grandmothers over the past months. 

We’ll also be answering your questions on the night – so please email questions in advance to webeditor@mptmagazine.com with Dead Women Poets focus online launch in the subject line. We’ll also try to respond to any comments on the livestream as they come in.

We want to thank everyone who shared and supported our crowdfunding campaign, and especially Harriet Truscott who sponsored this launch. Without all of you, none of this would have been possible. With your support, we're helping to right the gender imbalance of poetry published in translation. We hope you'll buy the issue, tune into the launch and #JointheSéance.

More about our guest readers

Zoë Brigley has three collections of poetry from Bloodaxe: The Secret, Conquest, and Hand & Skull, and all three are Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She also has a collection of nonfiction: Notes from a Swing State: Writing from Wales and America (Parthian). She is Assistant Professor in the English department at the Ohio State University. She runs an anti-violence advocacy podcast: Sinister Myth: How Stories We Tell Perpetuate Violence. She won an Eric Gregory Award, was Forward Prize commended, and listed in the Dylan Thomas Prize. She is currently co-editing an eco-justice themed issue of Magma Poetry on “Dwelling” as well as the Seren anthology 100 Poems for the Planet. She has a new chapbook out now with Broken Sleep Books, Aubade After a French Movie, and a chapbook with Verve is scheduled for 2021 titled Into Eros.

Natalie Linh Bolderston is a Vietnamese-Chinese-British poet. She was a runner-up in the 2019 BBC Proms Poetry Competition, came third in the 2019 National Poetry Competition, and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2020. She is a member of the 2019–20 Roundhouse Poetry Collective and the 2020–21 London Library Emerging Writers Programme. Her pamphlet, The Protection of Ghosts, is published with V. Press.

Jessica Wood is a poet from Yorkshire, currently based in Lisbon, Portugal. She has been involved in writing organisations since 2011 when she joined Sheffield Young Writers (now Hive) and The Writing Squad in 2014. She has stood as a board member of The Writing Squad since 2017 and independently published a pamphlet of poetry in 2019 called Temper.