Wed 7 May, 5.30-7.30pm
This reading and discussion group will focus on Bhanu Kapil’s experimental exploration of body and politics, Ban-en-Banlieue (2015). The book follows the story of Ban, a brown (black) girl as she walks home from school in the first moments of a riot. An April night in London, 1979 is the axis of this startling work, derived from performances in India, England and throughout the US, written at the limits of somatic and civic aims. Find out more about Kapil's book here.
Led by poet Jennifer Lee Tsai, currently an Artist in Residence at Bluecoat through the Wittenham Bursary, we will read and share our thoughts, ideas, and reflections on this innovative and fragmentary book in an inclusive, friendly, and encouraging space. All are welcome.
Free, booking essential
About the Artist
Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, editor and critic. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. A fellow of The Complete Works and a Ledbury Poetry Critic, she is the author of two poetry pamphlets Kismet (ignition press, 2019) and La Mystérique (Guillemot Press, 2022). Her work also features in the Bloodaxe anthologies Ten: Poets of the New Generation (2017) and Mapping The Future: The Complete Works Poets (2023). She is the recipient of a 2020 Northern Writers Award for Poetry and a co-winner of the Women Poets Prize. Lee Tsai is currently in residence at the Bluecoat, as part of the Wittenham Bursary.
About the Author
Bhanu Kapil is a poet and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. She was previously an artist by-fellow of Churchill College, and a Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow in the Faculty of English (2019-2020). In 2020, Kapil retired from Naropa University, a Buddhist-inspired private liberal arts college in Boulder, Colorado. As a professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she taught intensive seminars on narrative and architecture, poetry, fiction, contemplative practice, and performance art.
Kapil is the author of six books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2016), and How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020). How To Wash A Heart was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice. Two new, non-identical editions of Incubation (out of print for seven years in the U.S.) were published by Prototype (UK) and Kelsey Street Press (USA) in 2023.
Kapil is the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry from Yale University, and a Fellowship from the Royal Society of Literature. Her current practice is grounded in performance and collaboration.