Books & Spoken Word
Raise the Bar – Danez Smith
- Artists
- Danez Smith
Raise the Bar kick off a new season of spoken word shows at their new home, Arnolfini, with headline act, Danez Smith.
Danez has just been announced as the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Forward Prize for a poetry collection, and the first winner to identify as gender-neutral. (From The Guardian) “The collection is, said chair of judges Bidisha, “a powerful warning: this is what’s happening. Be alert, pay attention!” She added that its tight and lyrical poems show “an astonishing formal and emotional range and a mastery of metrical, musical language”.
“She paid tribute to its “bravery and defiance, and also yearning and anger. There’s desire and vulnerability. For us, this was a passionate and very contemporary collection and very universal in lots of ways. It’s not just about reducing a poet and saying they’re writing about police brutality in America. It’s about injustice and it’s about countering inequality with a stance of saying ‘I’m going to get up and speak out, I’m going to externalise my reality’. We loved that, the confidence of it.”
is needed now More than ever
Resident DJ Ngaio (of Booty Bass) will be spinning a selection of hip-hop, R&B, world music and UK underground.
Danez Smith is a Black, queer, poz writer & performer from St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), a finalist for National Book Award, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.
Danez is also the author of two chapbooks, including black movie (2015, Button Poetry), winner of the Button Poetry Prize. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow as well as the winner of the inaugural Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Danez’s work has been featured widely, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzzfeed, Best American Poetry, PBS NewsHour, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Early Birds // £5
Standard Tickets // £7
On the door (subject to availability) // £10
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