Image by Anthony Intraversato
Dear writers, readers and friends,
April is a month often associated with beginnings. Now that equinox has past, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are looking forward to a new season – one of light, warmth and colour. When we emerge from our caves after a long winter, will we see the world in new ways? This month’s visual prompt by Anthony Intraversato (https://www.instagram.com/anthonyintraversato/) brings to mind the insight that differing vantage points can create.
With so much going on in the world, we thought it only right to begin April with a choice selection of work arising from diverse pathways in the literary landscape, writers who between them traverse music, translation, travel, poetry, creative non-fiction and fiction
– a celebration of the multiplicity of writing identities represented in Visual Verse and a marker of how art brings us together in all our astonishing difference of form and voice.
Our lead writer Jeffrey Boakye (https://unseenflirtspoetry.wordpress.com/) is an author, teacher and father currently living in East London with his wife and two sons. His first book Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials, and the Meaning of Grime was published in 2017 by Influx Press. His upcoming book Black, Listed is due for publication in 2019. Jeffrey has a particular interest in education, race and popular culture. This is his first contribution to Visual Verse.
Our second lead, Abeer Y. Hoque (http://olivewitch.com/wordpress/) , is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer we met in India. She likes velvet, tequila and the corpse pose. Her books include a travel photography and poetry monograph (The Long Way Home, 2013), a linked collection of stories, poems and photographs (The Lovers and the Leavers, 2015) and a memoir (Olive Witch, 2017).
Delaina Haslam (http://dhaslamtranslation.com/index.html) is a translator of French and Spanish; she is also an editor and writer and is based in Sheffield. She has worked for publications including InMadrid magazine and le cool London, and about translation for Glasgow Review of Books, the Poetry Translation Centre, and Yorkshire Translators and Interpreters. She has been the invited translator at Poetry Translation Centre workshops, had a submission accepted for Newcastle University’s Poettrios Experiment and has performed collaborative translation at Sheffield’s Wordlife open mic night. She is writing a memoir about baby loss, for which she won the Off the Shelf Festival Novel Slam in 2016.
Finally, we’d like to introduce our new Editorial Assistant, Rose Warner Miles. Rose is from the US and has a Bachelor degree in English Literature & Psychology from Williams College. She grew up in New York, where she interned at Poets House and worked at the American Museum of Natural History. She is a poet, a wanderer, an intersectional feminist and an unapologetically devoted fan of cheesy TV teen soaps. We’re thrilled to add her enthusiasm and poetic nous to the team.
And so dear writers with April arriving, it’s no joke – the image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.
Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Rose
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