Saturday 14 June 2025, 7.30pm
Join us for a very special summer edition of MUSHAIRA — a night of poetry, music, and food, curated by the87press.
We’ll be joined by four phenomenal poets: Sarah Ghazal Ali, Saba Keramati, Susan Nguyen, and Rushika Wick. DJs Jimmy Two Shoes and Dr Aditi will carry us into the night with sweet tunes, while Chef Yogi sells delicious Sri Lankan food throughout the evening.
We’ll also be celebrating the releases of three the87press titles: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali (January 2025), Self-Mythology by Saba Keramati (March 2025), and the upcoming Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen (September 2025). We’re thrilled to host these three poets, visiting from the US, and are equally excited to welcome Rushika Wick to the stage.
Established in 2018, the87press is an Asian, LGBTQIA+, and neurodiverse led publishing collective and events curator in South London. We prioritize modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and environmentalism in our print publications of poetry, fiction, and essays. Additionally, we offer educational and creative workshops, industry leading live events, and regular commissioned work with online journal of culture theHythe. Committed to equity, all authors receive fair contracts regardless of their background. As part of Arts Council England's National Portfolio, we contribute to the Let's Create project and look forward to fostering inclusive learning spaces as the only NPO in the London Borough of Sutton.
Sarah Ghazal Ali is a poet and editor. A Stadler and Kundiman Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.
Saba Keramati is a writer, editor, and educator from the Bay Area. A winner of the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Contest, she received her MFA from UC Davis. Her writings have appeared in Adroit Journal, AGNI, The Margins, Poet Lore, and other publications. The poetry editor for Sundog Lit, Keramati currently lives in Dearborn, Michigan, with her partner and cats.
Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021 / the87press 2025) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award . Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Rumpus, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. She is currently the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review.
Rushika Wick (she/her) runs sunseekers poetry project with friend and poet Ana Seferovic - curating multidisciplinary and cross-modal arts events. She has collaborated with dancers, produced ekphrastic work for the National Gallery and creates poem objects. Her work has been widely published including in PBLJ, Poetry Review, Magma, bathmagg, SAND Berlin, Anthropocene and Gutter. Work as an editor includes co-editing of an international art and text anthology Disease (Carnaval Press 2023) and for Ambit and Tentacular magazines.
Her first collection Afterlife as Trash (Verve. 2021) interrogates selfhood and art in late-stage capitalism and was highly commended in the Forward Prizes. Her latest collection Horse (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) concerns speculative archives and has been long-listed for the Jhalak Prize. Infections of Loss (Broken Sleep, 2025) was the PBS Summer Pamphlet Choice.
Rushika is currently an MA student on the Writing Poetry MA at the Poetry School and Newcastle University.
Forever a humble student of the dancefloor, Jimmy Two Shoes is inspired by music and its capacity for creating those magical moments. As a Subtle Radio resident and multi-genre label boss of Sub Merchants, Jwarn seamlessly navigates an array of bass-infused flavors, delivering the flows to wriggle your toes to.
Dr. Aditi is a thinker, creator, and educator whose work intersects law, culture, and politics. Motivated by a politics of refusal, she fosters spaces of (un)learning through music, film, and visual culture to challenge ideologies of oppression. Aditi teaches "Rhythm, Race, Revolution" and other courses in London, exploring creativity as decolonial praxis and examining how Black and Brown cultural production resists racialized norms through self-determination. Her work is guided by an ethic of jazz.
