the87press & Housmans Bookshop present Hummingbirds 3.0: a literary salon with Karenjit Sandhu and Kiran Bath

Hummingbirds is a new literary salon series from the87press, designed to celebrate poetry and place different poets in discussion. The hummingbird is a surrealist motif that symbolises love and dialogue, something which we wish to foster further within poetry and literature. Each salon event offers an intimate space for live poetry readings and discussion.

Hummingbirds 3.0 brings together two writers from the Punjabi diaspora, Karenjit Sandhu and Kiran Bath (making a special visit from the US). In celebration of Karenjit’s and Kiran’s debut collections of poetry, this reading will celebrate diaspora as a space for feminist politics, intersectionality, performance on and off the page. Each poet will read and be in conversation, chaired by director of the87press, Azad Ashim Sharma.

OUR READERS

Kiran Bath is a writer and lawyer based in New York. She has received fellowships, residencies and support from Poets House, the Vermont Studio Center, Winter Tangerine and Brooklyn Poets. Kiran is a Kundiman fellow and a Tin House alumnus. Her work has been shortlisted for the Peach Gold in Poetry the Jake Adam York Prize, longlisted for the Pamet River Prize and nominated for the Best of the Net. Kiran’s poems appear in wildness, The Adroit Journal, The Brooklyn Rail and other decorated journals. INSTRUCTIONS FOR BANNO is Kiran’s debut collection of poetry with Kelsey Street Press.

In her debut poetry collection, Kiran Bath travels through the timelines and geographies of the women in her family to understand the inherited consequences of becoming a South Asian bride (banno). Threading stories of pre-partition matriarchs, migrant mothers, and first generation daughters, she renders themes of subjugation, domestic violence, honor killings, and infanticide alongside unrequited love, sisterhood, motherhood, and devotion in cathartic form. The result is the set of instructions left for BANNO, a diary that ruptures the institution of filial duty and embodies the tradition that survives it—an insistence for declaring our humanity.

Karenjit Sandhu is a poet and artist. She is a Lecturer in Art at the Reading School of Art, University of Reading. Her publications include Poetic Fragments from the Irritating Archive (Guillemot Press), young girls! (the87press) and Baby 19 (intergraphia books). Her work is featured in Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry and The Blue Notebook: Journal for Artists’ Books. Her artists’ books have been collected by the Tate Archive (London) and exhibited at The Showroom (London) and Galerie éof (Paris). Sandhu’s performance work has led to collaborations with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Barbican, Flat Time House and Christie’s (London), Arnolfini (Bristol) and Galerie Eric Dupont (Paris). She is a member of the British Art Network and has written for exhibition catalogues on contemporary British, European and South Asian art.

TICKETS HERE: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hummingbirds-30-a-literary-salon-with-karenjit-sandhu-and-kiran-bath-tickets-995099719047?aff=oddtdtcreator