Image by Kitty Harrison
Today we celebrate nine years of innovative, diverse, brave and wonderful writing.
Happy birthday to all writers, readers and friends of Visual Verse.
Visual Verse is nine years old today! Kristen and I, with designer Pete Lewis, launched the site on 1st November 2013 and since then (through country moves, career changes, successes, knock-backs, crises, euphoria, births, deaths, and trips to London, Newcastle, and Berlin) we have rolled with a team of guest editors and star volunteers to bring you our monthly anthology of art and words. We have not missed a single issue in nine years and have published over 10,000 pieces – an incredible achievement. Visual Verse is not for profit, run by volunteers and our contributors do it for love of the process; to inspire you, delight you and to keep the love going of wild adventures in writing. Over nine years, the worldwide Visual Verse community has grown from around 50 submissions a month to 200, with a newsletter subscription list that runs into thousands from every continent in the world.
Thank you, readers, writers, volunteers and all our supporters: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Not many of you might know this, but co-founder Kristen “Kitty” Harrison (https://twitter.com/CurvedHouse/) is herself an artist, as well as being a writer, publisher and producer at The Curved House (https://thecurvedhouse.com) , an independent publisher working at the intersection of books, art and education. I am thrilled to debut her work on Visual Verse this month, with a piece called ‘Letter Home’. Kristen recently relocated back from Berlin to be nearer to her family in Australia and that’s what has inspired this month’s birthday image. It’s the first time she’s sharing her art with us, and we love to see it.
I stepped back from regularly curating the site about a year ago, as it’s been a big year for me. Over the last two years I’ve been busy writing my second book, Aftermath and it was published in early 2022; just last month I was astonished to find it had won the UK’s Gordon Burn Prize (https://newwritingnorth.com/gordon-burn-prize/ ) . I am thrilled to return to curate our birthday issue and very proud to welcome back the profoundly important words of Sandeep Parmar (https://twitter.com/SandeepKParmar/) to lead. Sandeep first wrote for Visual Verse as lead in Vol.1 Issue 2 (December 2013): that early poem now appears in her latest collection F (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sandeep-Parmar-Faust-p470007726) aust (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sandeep-Parmar-Faust-p470007726) , published by Shearsman this month.
Sandeep is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. Her research is primarily in modernist women’s writing and contemporary poetry and race. Her groundbreaking article ‘Still Not a British Subject: Race and UK Poetry (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/not-a-british-subject-race-and-poetry-in-the-uk/) ’ was published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2017, she co-founded the Ledbury Poetry Critics (https://twitter.com/LedburyCritics/) scheme for poetry reviewers of colour. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Sandeep’s books include Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman, scholarly editions for Carcanet Press of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees and The Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard, and Threads with Bhanu Kapil and Nisha Ramayya, as well as three books
of her own poetry: The Marble Orchard, Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection, and Faust (Shearsman, 2022).
We are also really excited this month to collaborate with the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize (https://www.wasafiri.org/new-writing-prize/) , which I co-judged this year. The Prize, run by Wasafiri (https://www.wasafiri.org/) magazine, supports writers who have not yet published a book-length work, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background, and rewards work in three categories: Poetry, Fiction and Life Writing. The three winners join us this month…
Hasti Crowther (https://twitter.com/youarehasti/) is a poet and writer living in South East London. A member of the Southbank New Poets Collective and the Ledbury Poetry Critics, they are the recipient of the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, and have recently published poems in bathmagg, zindabad, and The Willowherb Review. They have also co-written short sci-fi film Digging (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/film4-foresight-shorts/on-demand/70987-001) , produced by Film4. Hasti has created shows for Montez Press Radio and also hosts monthly open mic and poetry night Fresh Lip.
Sylee Gore (https://twitter.com/BerlinReified) is an Indian American writer based between Berlin and Oxford. She received the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction (UK), the 2022 Bird in Your Hands Prize (US), and a 2021 VG Wort Neustart Kultur fellowship (DE). In 2022/23, she co-heads a literary partnership between Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, and Rothermere American Institute, Oxford.
Nadine Monem (she/her) works in hybrid forms of non-fiction, memoir and theory. Her work has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Catapult Books memoir workshop for writers of colour. She is the winner of the 2022 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for life writing, and runner-up for the 2022 Sewanee Review (https://thesewaneereview.com/) Nonfiction Contest. Nadine teaches writing and critical theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Hasti, Sylee and Nadine’s prize-winning pieces will be published in Wasafiri 113, published Spring 2023, and accompanied by an illustration by Aude Nasr (https://cargocollective.com/audenasr) .
As we head into our 10th year of publishing we hope you enjoy this month, and look back over our archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) to read the work of the last decade’s most exciting new and established voices practicing across continents and themes.
The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…
Preti Taneja
with Kristen, Lucie and Isabel
Special thanks and welcome to Zaynab Bobi (Nigeria), Ashish Kumar Singh (India) and Wes White (UK) who join the Visual Verse team this month as volunteer editorial assistants.
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Visual Verse Preti Taneja Kristen Harri (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/) son/The Curved House (https://twitter.com/curvedhouse/)
Sandeep Parmar (https://twitter.com/SandeepKParmar/)
Hasti Crowther (https://twitter.com/youarehasti/)
Sylee Gore (https://twitter.com/BerlinReified)
Nadine Monem (https://twitter.com/nadinemonem/)