Four London Poets

Contact: grambuch@aol.com

Come and hear substantial sets of work from four of London’s finest and most communicative poets.

Originally from New Zealand, Deryl Walsh crashed the London performance poetry scene in 2000, quickly becoming a regular at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden. She was recently invited back to the cafe to celebrate 20 years of Poetry Unplugged along with other poets. Her witty, observational and sometimes comical poems have been performed at nights such as Apples and Snakes, Express Excess and Shortfuse. More recently Deryl has been seen in her local Walthamstow area putting on events and hanging out with the Forest poets. She curated a backyard festival for the E17 arts trail in 2015 and performed at the Walthamstow Garden Party sponsored by the Barbican. In her day to day life Deryl works with young people in East London running a mentoring programme and is mum to twin boys Alex and Jack and daughter Ruby. For the evening at Rich Mix she will be reading from her self published booklet "Travels of a Transitchick" along with a few new pieces.

Jacob Sam-La Rose was born and raised in London of Guyanese heritage. His collection 'Breaking Silence' (Bloodaxe) was shortlisted for a Forward Poetry prize and a Aldeburgh Fenton award, and is a set text for the OCR English Language and Literature A Level. He has been commissioned to produce new work for the BBC, the National Gallery, International PEN and other institutions. He’s toured with the British Council and featured at the Leipzig Buchmesse, the Urb Festival (Helsinki), the Cuirt Festival (Galway), the Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writers’ Conference (Chicago) and more. He’s served as writer-in-residence at Raffles Institution (Singapore) and has worked with writers in Riga, Kuala Lumpur, Gaborone and Rio De Janeiro. His work has been translated into Portuguese, Latvian, French and Dutch. He is widely recognised as an indefatigable facilitator, mentor and supporter of young and emerging poets.

Leah Fritz grew up in New York, chose London 30 years ago. Her fifth collection, Whatever Sends the Music into Time: New and Selected Poems, was published by Salmon in 2012. Critiques by Christopher Middleton, Alan Brownjohn and others are in her website at poetry pf where her awards, commendations and work as an adjudicator are also mentioned. She has appeared in Acumen, PN Review, Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and others in Britain, Italy, Romania and the USA. Two prose books, Thinking Like a Woman, essays and reportage of ‘60s and ‘70s protest movements, and Dreamers & Dealers: An Intimate Appraisal of the Women’s Movement, were published respectively by WINBooks, New York and Beacon Press, Boston. Among her co-translations of Romanian poetry are Deepening the Mystery, by Cristiana Maria Purdescu, (paperback) and Born in Romania, by Liviu Ioan Stoiciu.

Bryan Baker was born and brought up in the suburbs of London and has lived most of his life in South London close to the centre. He began writing poetry in the mid 90s when he attended poetry workshops at the City Lit. He is also a fine artist; readers of Southbank Poetry magazine will have seen his drawings on the covers. He often reads at open mic events. Much of his work looks at the darker aspects and idiocies of human nature and loss, it ranges through the oddness of everyday relationships, the remembered past and the surreal. Three of his poems can be heard on the Lunar Poetry Podcast, interview by poet Lizzy Palmer - Youtube. He has been published in various magazines and is included in the recent poetry anthology A Barrel of Monkeys published by dempseyandwindle.co.uk

Entry: FREE

Time: 7.45 for 8.00 pm