The Talisman Poetry & Spoken Word Open Mic w/ featured poet Mab Jones
Schedule
Thu, 30 Jan, 2025 at 07:00 pm
UTC+00:00Location
Elysium | Swansea, WA
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Join us for the first Talisman of the year, featuring the amazing Mab Jones reading a selection of her work followed by the usual poetry & spoken word open mic. Sign up to read from 7.30pm ahead of readings starting at 8pm.Mab Jones has read her poems all over the UK, in the US, Ireland, France, and Japan; at festivals such as Green Man and Latitude; on BBC Radio 4; and more. She was the first Resident Poet in the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and has also been Resident Writer at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse. She is currently Resident Writer of Cardiff Wetlands Nature Reserve, and is the creator and host of a literary podcast about the wetlands of Wales which is funded by a recently received Royal Society of Literature ‘Literature Matters’ Award.
Mab is the winner of many other awards and accolades, including the John Tripp Spoken Poetry Audience Prize, the Neil Gaiman Word Factory Short Story Competition, the Aurora Poetry Competition, the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival Grand Jury Prize. She was, in recent years, the recipient of a Creative Wales Award, one of the country’s highest arts honours.
Her first collection, Poor Queen, was published by Burning Eye Books. Her second, take your experience and peel it, was published by Indigo Dreams. A pamphlet, Rogue 13, was published by Analog Press. In 2020, a pamphlet containing poems about Wales was published, called This Is The Land That Grew Me, with Selcouth Station Press, and also in that year she published a pamphlet of haiku, 111 Haiku for Lockdown. A further collection, Yubitsume, is due out in 2022 with Indigo Dreams.
Mab has also been published in various newspapers and journals e.g. the Spectator; has appeared on BBC television and presented several BBC Radio 3 and 4 poetry programmes; is the founder editor of Black Sheep Journal and Black Rabbit Press; has blogged for Mslexia magazine and Write Out Loud; and organises events, which have included the first Welsh editions of Pecha Kucha Night (from Japan), Literary Death Match (from the US), 100,000 Poets for Change (worldwide), UK Slam! Championships (London) and more. In addition, Mab ran International Dylan Thomas Day in 2016 and 2017, and currently still runs the annual Dylan Day poetry competition, Love The Words.
Mab is a freelance writer for the New York Times, has a monthly poetry reviews column in Buzz Magazine, mentors poets via the Poetry Society, and teaches creative writing and poetry at Cardiff University. Supporting and inspiring others, and amplifying Welsh poetry, eco-poetry, and diverse voices, are part of her current mission; recent projects related to this include her Lockdown Writers’ Club, and Poetry in the Arcades, in which Mab commissioned several poets to write pieces that are now on display in Cardiff’s historic arcades.
Reviews
“Excellent” – Metro
“A unique talent” – The Times
“Absolutely brilliant” – The Guardian
“She is fantastic!” – BBC Radio Wales
“Mab is fab!” – Hugo Williams
“A real creative force” – Evening Post
“Inspiring… Mab’s poem speaks for all women and girls in the world everywhere” – Jane Hutt MP
“Mab Jones’ poetry is suffused with a cool wit and a wisdom beyond her years. Her work is beautifully layered and contains bittersweet depths” – Phill Jupitus
“Delightful verse, articulate and imaginative” – Three Weeks
“Mab Jones is a whirlwind of controlled, lyrical delirium. Her work is smart and funny, saturated with meaning.” – Literary Death Match, USA
“Mab Jones is a poet of detail…Occasionally surreal, she has originality of thought and imagination…. lush imagery and deft forms” – Sabotage Review
“Richly diverse… [with] immediacy, quick wit, and vitality… Jones’s poetry is simply a pleasure to read” – Acumen
“The stage’s loss is the page’s gain” – Poetry Wales review of take your experience and peel it
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Where is it happening?
Elysium, 210 High Street, Swansea, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
