In collaboration with the Centre for New and International Writing at University of Liverpool, we have curated several sessions that invite international and local poets, authors, artists and community groups to open up discussions around a variety of texts. Featuring works from Audre Lorde, Angela Carter, bell hooks and Octavia Butler, these texts illustrate how these seminal women writers paved the way for the more modern fairy tales and ritualistic storytelling we see today.

These groups will be held in our Learning Space, which has been specially designed to encourage a diverse range of entry points into the main themes explored throughout our Spring exhibition and Learning programme.

Wed 3 Apr

For the first Reading & Discussion Group, we welcome poet, essayist and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir.

Alsadir has chosen two texts: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic of Power by Audre Lorde, an analysis of female power and why it is so often limited and constrained; and her own text Since Feeling is First, which explores the difference between logical and emotional interpretation and understanding.

Nuar Alsadir is the author of the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular (Pavilion Poetry, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection; and More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, BOMB, The New York Times Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Poetry London and The Poetry Review. She is a fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities and works as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York. Nuar is the Centre for New and International Writing (University of Liverpool) Hope Street Writer in Residence for Spring 2019.

Wed 1 May

For our second Reading & Discussion Group, we welcome Dr Sophie Oliver, Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Liverpool.

Sophie has chosen two texts: 'The Tiger's Bride' and 'Wolf-Alice', both from Angela Carter's collection of subversive and sensual collection of fairytales 'The Bloody Chamber' (which can be downloaded by clicking on the link below). Sophie chose to explore these stories - each one full of shifting shapes and transgressed boundaries - after hearing artist Marianna Simnett (currently exhibited at FACT) describe her interest in ‘transformation’.

Dr Sophie Oliver specialises in writing by women, and is especially interested in feminism, the relationships between literature and visual cultures, and the afterlives of modernism. She has published articles on Djuna Barnes and on Jean Rhys, who was also the subject of an exhibition she conceived and curated at the British Library, London, in 2016, ‘Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea and the Making of an Author’. Her first authored book – Make It New? Modernism, Fashion and Transatlantic Modernity – is forthcoming in 2020. Sophie also writes about literature and art for mainstream magazines, including the TLS, Burlington Magazine and The White Review.

Wed 5 Jun

For our third Reading & Discussion Group, we welcome Rio Matchett, Post Graduate Researcher at the University of Liverpool.

Rio has chosen Locker Room Talk: a verbatim play - meaning all the words are taken from real life interviews - that explores some of the things men say about women when they are given anonymity. Inspired by Donald Trump's infamous 'locker room banter', this play isn't so much about what men say, as about why they say it. Originally performed by a cast of women, Locker Room Talk challenges the words we speak as a society, and the power structures we accept.

Please be aware that this play features content around sexual assult.

Rio Matchett is a current Post Graduate Researcher at the University of Liverpool. She specialised in the fields of modernism, periodical studies, and feminist/queer theory. She serves on the committee for the European Society of Periodical Studies, and the organising committee of the Queer Modernism(s) Conference with takes place annually at the University of Oxford. Rio is also a freelance theatre director, dramaturg and practitioner, as well as the New Works Co-Ordinator at the Everyman and Playhouse in Liverpool.