Correspondences: Collaboration, Noise & Innovative Poetries

Join us for this sounding of poetry by Matt Kirkham, Zara Meadows and Alanna Offield, alongside Correspondences – a soundscape and piano composition by Shannon Kuta Kelly. Layering recordings of voices from around the world with its original English, Correspondences performs “Didn't get round to Nick Cave's Carnage” a recent collaboration by Eilish Martin and Natasha Cuddington.

Natasha Cuddington was born in Saskatchewan. In 2017, she was announced as the recipient of the Irish Chair of Poetry Bursary. Her début collection, Each of us (our chronic alphabets) was published by Arlen House in 2018. An assistant editor at Cyphers, she co-edited, with Ruth Carr, Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse (Arlen House, 2020).

Matt Kirkham has three collections of poetry, most recently Thirty-Seven Theorems of Incompleteness (Templar, 2019), which tells the story of the marriage of Kurt and Adele Gödel. Born in Luton, living in Co. Down, Matt works as a teacher.

Shannon Kuta Kelly is a writer, translator, and musician. Her work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, the Irish Times, Body Prague, and the London Magazine. She has collaborated with the Romanian ConTempo String Quartet for events such as the Dublin Enescu Festival and performances in conjunction with the Embassy of Romania in Ireland. She is a doctoral researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

Eilish Martin is a poet whose amatory relation to both the natural world and lingual matter fund restless forages of form and into the materiality of text. In the wake of her acclaimed publications slitting the tongues of jackdaws (1999) and Ups Bounce Dash (2008), she continues to reform and recast linguistic instinct towards painted, drawn, collaged and other dynamic verbal-visual forms. 

Zara Meadows is a writer from Belfast. Their work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, fourteen poems, Banshee, bath magg, and Trumpet. They are in their final year of an English with Creative Writing degree at Queen's University Belfast, and they are the current President of Queen's Writers' Society.

Alanna Offield is a disabled, queer Chicana from New Mexico now living in the north of Ireland. Her poetry has appeared in Howl, Cyphers, Abridged, and other publications. She is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast and has a pamphlet forthcoming in 2024 with VIBE Press. She is the owner of Seaside Books, an independent online and travelling bookshop.