Performances/Events/Workshops (2025)

Café OTO launch for Autobiography of a Performance: October 24th, 2025

https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/the87press-present-mushaira-october-25/

We are proofing the book right now. Two days ago, we spent eleven hours reading it aloud word for word and checking the spelling of every name. 

The autobiography of a performance is communal. Autobiography is not a private act.  

What a joy and pleasure to spend time with Blue Pieta, writing together and dreaming now of the Café Oto launch.  

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula Le Guin: October 10th, 2025

This is the launch for a new Silver Press anthology, at the Architectual Association in London.  I wrote a story with the help of my mother, who contributed much agricultural lore, which I will be reading from at the launch.  It was beautiful to spend time with the maps of Ursula Le Guin.  I want to create a three-dimensional map for my novel, The Secret Garden. Is there a map of the night sky and the forest that's conjoined?

https://www.silverpress.org/blogs/news/the-word-for-world-the-maps-of-ursula-k-le-guin

Voci lontane, voci sorelle (Florence): September 24th, 2025

Reverberations Mixtape Launch: September 18th, 2025

https://www.theracialimaginary.org/news-and-events/reverberations-mixtape

To launch Reverberations Mixtape, artists Chitra Ganesh, members of Rojava Film Commune Şerif Çiçek and Diyar Hesso, and artist Hồng-An Trương will discuss their works from the project with mixtape organizers denisse andrade, Michele Chinitz, and Mia Curran.

Reverberations Mixtape gathers artists, writers, and scholars through the format of audio fragments that ruminate on, resound with, and respond to the question of how to build futurity as a collective practice. In building a mixtape, we foreground the possibilities of sound as a transportation device for liberation and community building.

The project includes audio tracks by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme; Ersin Çelik and Şerif Çiçek, members of the Rojava Film Commune; Chitra Ganesh; Bhanu Kapil; Tanvi Solanki; and Hồng-An Trương.

Listen to the mixtape and learn about the project by visiting:

www.reverberationsmixtape.info

Launch Event: Thursday, September 18, 6:00 PM Alas, I am soon leaving London, about to meet Emgee Dufresne, who flew in last night. Emgee is a publisher (Kelsey Street Press), poet, ceramicist and somatic practitioner. Sometimes your whole life can be the mixtape. 

The James Gallery, Ground Floor, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York

Free admission

Reverberations Mixtape was conceived through the “On Nationalism” series co-organized by The Racial Imaginary Institute and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Pitzhanger Manor (Ealing): September 4th, 2025

A performance with Prem Sahib, in a borough of London that -- well, I'm still processing the gift of this experience, which is ahead of us. In September. The month of gone but still here.  Blackberries rotting in the aquamarine sunlight. Ravens trotting about in their ragged overcoats, the last moult (molt) almost complete. 

Prem Sahib

Permindar Kaur and Prem Sahib: Talks and Performances

From 6–7pm, Permindar Kaur will be in conversation with Roger Malbert, curator, writer, and former Head of Hayward Touring at the Southbank Centre (2000–2018), discussing her exhibition Mirror, Mirror and wider themes in her practice.

At 7.15pm, there will be a spoken performance with Prem Sahib and writer and performer Bhanu Kapil. The performance will respond to Prem Sahib: Doubles and its contents.

Visitors will also experience Prem Sahib’s Liquid Gold, which will illuminate the manor after dark. This work will be echoed by a second installation in a building in Southall, connecting the two sites for the evening.

One £12 ticket will grant you access to both talks. Guests are welcome to attend the full programme or either element.

Venue:

Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, Ealing Green, London W5 5EQ

Award Ceremony for 16th International Poetry and People Prize (China): September 1, 2025

Huang Lihai, an experimental writer based in Guangzhou, founded this prize in 1999. Previous winners: Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Tomas Tranströmer, Anne Carson, and Gary Snyder! I was unable to attend the ceremony, and so recorded an offering that was played during the ceremony. Sequences of How To Wash A Heart were -- staged. Here is the trophy, here is a photograph from the performance, here is the certificate. 

Launch for Nisha Ramayya's States of the Body Produced by Love (Silver Press) at London Review of Books book-shop: July 3rd, 2025

About this event:

Nisha Ramayya’s States of the Body Produced By Love is a modern mystical journey through love – an opalescent world by way of Tantric ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. In this new expanded edition, a new afterword (including a story by Bhanu Kapil) offers fierce meditations on diasporic identity, language and resistance.

Ramayya and Kapil will give readings followed by a panel discussion with Eley Williams and Sarah Shin. This will be followed by drinks to celebrate the new edition and Spiral House Editions, the new imprint of Silver Press – a home for art, poetry, transformation and ways of knowing.

Poetry Reading, Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English, Cambridge: June 11th, 2025

Two incredible writers, Idil Tekin and Jigisha Bhattacharya, both PhD students in the Faculty of English, will read. Then, Kathryn Scalan will read stories with animals in them as a Saggitarius Full Moon rises above Cambridge.

Writing the Body: An encounter with compositional practice, gesture, and poem: May 27th, 2025

Workshop at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, with Blue Pieta, curated by Hannah Lucas. We called it The Theatre of Strangers. It was a beautiful day, with many others flowing as a group until the candles flickered on the long table. The next day, Blue and I decompressed over a brioche doughnut at Churchill College.

Radical Dreamery with Precious Okoyomon, Kunsthaus Bregenz: May 24th, 2025

https://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/en/calendar-of-events/details/2025-05-24_0000/radical-dreamery-a-weekend-with-precious-okoyomon

Here, the golden rocks of Lake Constance emit rainbows. Is this the portal of the sun? Many portals, says Precious, describing an installation as yet to be. On the night I arrive, the train from Munich has been delayed, and so, arriving, this incredible music is rolling down two flights of concrete stairs. I walk into the music. Doom metal. Divide and Dissolve. This was a time. I was so moved. And -- Bracha Ettinger: a miracle of a human being. The hotel with the amazing breakfast and coffee and plush bed. Steep hill. Forest. In the mountains, near water, you don't have to make an effort to connect with your ancestors, I've found. They're already there?  The Radical Dreamery was amazing. There was also milk from a toadstool served by a lovely, petite human being, and I wish I had a photo of that. My dream was to sit on that teddy bear, and that's what happened. We sat on the teddy bear. Bracha, Precious and I sat on the teddy bear. I learned so much from Bracha about creativity, anxiety and the need to separate, to create a boundary. I learned so much from Precious about wandering, about freedom. Incubation, butterflies.

The Horse Hospital, London: May 18, 2025

https://www.thehorsehospital.com/events/plastique-fantastique-we-is-hare

A reading of humanimal [a project for future children] + mutations, with The Dark Reading Group, who have accidentally become -- how? -- a part of my heart, the way I am beginning to settle down as a writer, feel at home once more in the UK.

"The Dark Reading Group will turn off the lights, sit in a circle, pass a torch around the group in a clockwise direction around the group, illuminating texts and writing, which are read out loud." 

The amazing Plastique Fantastique, later in the evening. Side-glimpse of David Burrows, who is a member of our own Dark Reading Group.

FOR REAL FOR REAL, Berlin: May 15th, 2025

Opening:

For which I  wrote/made a book, Autobiography on 40 Scraps of Paper, inspired by the unfinished notebook project of Robert Musil.  He imagined his 40 Diaries as a collected work, but many/some were -- lost.