Saturday 13 June 2026, 7.30pm
Join the87press for Mushaira, an evening of poetry, music, and community. Rooted in the South Asian tradition of shared verse and gathering, Mushaira is a live literature series celebrating unique and emerging poetic voices.
With readings by Palestinian poets Issam Zineh and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Kurdish American poet Tracy Fuad, Arianna Afsari reading from Juan Gelman’s Notes/Notas, and Jay Bernard reading from Pat Parker’s Selected Poems as well as selections from their own works.
This evening celebrates the publication of five poetry collections— Notes/Notas by Juan Gelman, Portal by Tracy Fuad, Terror Counter by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Unceded Land by Issam Zineh, and Selected Poems by Pat Parker.
Enjoy DJ Jimmy Two Shoes’ tunes throughout the night and grab a bite to eat from Chef Yogi’s pop up kitchen, serving delicious Sri Lankan cuisine. To help the chef prepare and minimise food waste, please purchase your tickets as soon as possible. All meals will range from £10-£15 with smaller snack options also available.
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.
Issam Zineh is a Palestinian-American poet, editor, and public health worker. He is author of Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022; the87press, 2026), finalist for the Trio Award, Medal Provocateur, Housatonic Book Award, and Balcones Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Moment of Greatest Alienation (Ethel Press, 2021). His work appears in AGNI, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Split This Rock, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Arianna Afsari is a translator and doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She examines Argentine militant poetry of the 1960s and 70s alongside traditions of Persian militant poetics deployed as tools of anticolonial resistance. Afsari works across three languages: Persian, Spanish, and Russian. As a translator, she has published English translations of selected poems and a preface from Juan Gelman’s book, Dibaxu, in the literary translation journal, Absinthe: World Literature in Translation (December 2023).
Juan Gelman (1930–2014) was a prestigious Argentine poet. A writer from childhood, he worked as a journalist and translator and was also a member of guerrilla organisations. In exile during the military dictatorship that took over in 1976, he returned to Argentina in 1988, although he was to settle in Mexico. Much of his life and writing were marked by the kidnapping and disappearance of his children and the search for his granddaughter, who was born in captivity. He was the fourth Argentine to be awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, following in the footsteps of Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sabato and Adolfo Bioy Casares. He is considered to be one of the greatest contemporary poets writing in Spanish.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and the author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, 2025; the87press 2026) and ANTIGONE. VELOCITY. SALT. (Deep Vellum, 2027).
Tracy Fuad is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her second collection of poetry, PORTAL (University of Chicago Press, 2024; the87press, 2026), won the Phoenix Emerging Poets’ Prize. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Fuad’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a-Day and have been translated into Kurdish, Turkish, German, and Spanish. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry and directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on a novel.
Jay Bernard (FRSL) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in sound, poetry and social history. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for debut collection Surge. Recent work includes Far from the Start, an audio installation at Studio Voltaire that re-imagines the Windrush; Blue Now, a live rendition of Derek Jarman’s film ‘Blue’; Joint, a poetic-play about the history of joint enterprise; Crystals of this Social Substance, a sound installation about young people, capitalism and money at the 2021 Serpentine pavilion; Complicity, a pamphlet about colonial memory in the urban environment, based on the collection at the Tate; and The Last X Years, a digital and live sound piece produced by Art Angel. Jay was a DAAD literature fellow 2022, a 2023 fellow at the Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris and is the 2025 Judith E. Wilson poetry fellow at the University of Cambridge.
Alongside her invaluable contributions to social justice, Pat Parker (1944-1989) wrote five collections of poetry during her lifetime and is widely recognised as one of the leading African-American, lesbian-feminist voices of the 20th Century. Selected Poems collects her most loved works into an accessible volume, introducing new readers to Parker's fire for justice, tenderness, and vision for the world.This is the first time Pat Parker's poetry has been published in the United Kingdom.
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.
