Nottingham Contemporary

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (2015), and more recently, Notes on Mother Tongues (2020). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday nights reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017-19. Her next book, The Autobiography of a Language, is forthcoming with Futurepoem (2021).

Lila Matsumoto is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of Nottingham. Recent works include the poetry collection Urn & Drum (2018) and an essay on immigration and folk ritual which aired on BBC Radio 3. She convenes the Nottingham Poetry Exchange, a programme of poetry readings and seminars. Her research and practice is focused on experimental forms of production and performance of poetry, and the points of contact, historical and potential, between literary practice and visual arts.

Maureen N. McLane is a poet, critic, educator, and divagator working in a tradition of lyric and critical inquiry. She has published six books of poetry, including This Blue which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, Mz N: the serial, Some Say, finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry, and What I’m Looking For: Selected Poems. Her book, My Poets, an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. She has also published two critical monographs on British romantic poetics and numerous essays on contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have recently appeared in the London Review of Books, Granta, PN Review, and Bomb; her most recent essay appeared in Public Books. She is Professor of English at New York University.

Jack Thacker is Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Critical Poetics at NTU, where he supports the Critical Poetics Research Group. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including PN Review, Stand, Blackbox Manifold, The Clearing and Caught by the River, as well as on BBC Radio 4. In 2016, he won the Charles Causley International Poetry Competition. He has been the poet in residence at the Museum of English Rural Life and more recently the ArtfulScribe writer in residence at Lighthouse, Poole. His debut poetry pamphlet Handling (2018) is published by Two Rivers Press.