Joelle Taylor: C+NTO & Othered Poems

2021 T.S. Eliot Prize Winning Poet Joelle Taylor will be performing and reading from C+NTO & Othered Poems and will be in conversation with author Paul Burston, with performances from WoW’s Ghost Writers.

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who, prior to the pandemic, completed a world tour with her collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of four collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of inter-connecting short stories The Night Alphabet. Her new poetry collection C+NTO & Othered Poems was published in June 2021 and is the subject of the Radio 4 arts documentary Butch.

The female body is a political space. C+NTO enters the private lives of women from the butch counterculture, telling the inside story of the protests they led in the '90s to reclaim their bodies as their own - their difficult balance between survival and self-expression.

History, magic, rebellion, party and sermon vibrate through Joelle Taylor's cantos to uncover these underground communities forged by women. Part-memoir and part-conjecture, Taylor explores sexuality and gender in poetry that is lyrical, expansive, imagistic, epic and intimate. C+NTO is a love poem, a riot, a late night, and an honouring.

Paul Burston is the author of six novels and four non-fiction books including bestseller The Black Path (2016), The Gay Divorcee (2009), Lovers & Losers (2007) and his debut novel Shameless (2001) was shortlisted for the State of Britain Award. In 2016, Paul Burston was featured in the British Council’s Global List of ‘33 visionary people promoting freedom, equality and LGBT rights around the world.’ A Rainbow List NAtional Treasure and former AIDS activist with ACT-UP London, he is one of the subjects of Alexis Gregory’s verbatim play Riot Act.

Host or Publisher Writing on the Wall