We will be hosting the launch of Kent Review: an anthology of writing from the University of Kent. We will be hearing from poets: Jane Hartshorn, Betsy Porritt, and Moyra Tourlamain, and prose writers: Martha Schulman, Sapphire Allard, and Charlotte Hanson. There will be juice and wine. £2 or whatever you can afford in the pink/red receptacle. Please join us to celebrate the work from contributors: Anna Richards, Charlotte Hanson, Rebecca Kiwi-Barnstien, Angelina Lesniewski, Betsy Porritt, Jane Shankar, Gemma Jackson, Martha Schuman, Moyra Tourlamain, Olivia Rosenthall, Steve Noyes, Katharina Maria Kalinowski, Jonathan Walker, Ken Moffat, Jane Hartshorn, Sapphire Allard, Nathan Hassall, Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow, and Safiya Allaf.
Reader biographies
Jane Hartshorn has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Kent. In 2017, her first pamphlet tract was published by Litmus Publishing. She has had poems published in Front Horse, Rag Queen, MAP Magazine, Raum, Gnommero, and Glasgow University’s From Glasgow to Saturn. In October 2018, she began a practice-led PhD in Poetry at the University of Kent.
Betsy Porritt is working on a research/practice PhD in poetry and visual art at Kent. Her poetry has been performed in galleries & on radio shows, published in a chapbook series and by Side Issues. Porritt was recently shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She contributes reviews to online art magazines and works with experimental sound group Athelstan Sound. Porritt’s three- part project, Complex Kinships, concluded in September, with an exhibition of new audio installations at LIMBO Gallery, Margate. She currently lives and breathes in Kent.
Moyra Tourlamain’s work features in several anthologies. Her translations of Paul Celan have appeared in Stand, where extracts from a recent sequence, Occipital Outcome, will also be published in 2019. She is a contributor to The Kent Review, Splinter, and Botch. Her first complete work, The Book of Hours of Kitty Power, was published in 2015 by vErIsImIlItUdE. She was Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year 2010/11. Currently a PhD student at the University of Kent, she has been an educational publisher, a magazine editor, a broadcaster, and a BBC bureaucrat. (also – intermittently – a teacher, a truck driver, a cleaner and a freelance editor). She is Deputy Editor at Muscaliet Press.
A native New Yorker, Martha Schulman is starting her third year of PhD study at Kent. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, has ten years experience teaching people to read, write, think, and/or punctuate, and hires out as a copyeditor. Her short stories, personal essays, and reviews have been published in the US and the UK. She believes in the serial comma and the semicolon, even (especially) in these troubled times.
Sapphire Allard is a second year Text, Practice and Research Ph.D student. Her research focuses on communication and language affecting disabilities and how they are, and can be, represented within literature. Her research is inspired by learning British Sign Language and working with people with a range of disabilities that alter they way they communicate, most recently children with autism. In particular, she is motivated by how this work has created a re-shift in her own perception of the relationship between intelligence, language and creativity. She is interested in how stories connect people together, and the ways people find to tell stories when communication is not easy.
Charlotte Hanson writes feminist short fiction with an interest in the working-class experiences of women. Perspectives of mothers, children, elderly and poor females are explored through work that she hopes gives insight and may effect change in attitudes towards the domestic and commonplace role that working-class women are required to fill. Previous work has engaged with child poverty, lesbianism, matriarchal abuse, and abandonment. Current work in progress focuses on the effects of gaslighting on working-class women and the violence that the media encourages towards these women. Feminist fiction has become her main interest although American Modernism is the vehicle that bought her here.