Friday 24 October 2025, 7pm
Please note that doors will be at 7pm for a 7:30pm start.
Join the87press for a special Mushaira featuring the launches of Autobiography of a Performance by Blue Pieta/Bhanu Kapil, with a performance featuring vocalist/musician Kath Gifford, Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates, and The Nightmare Sequence by Omar Sakr, illustrated by Safdar Ahmed (virtual reading). The evening will also feature guest readings from poets Hannah Copley and Isabelle Baafi.
Mushaira is a live literature reading series featuring authors published by independent presses.
DJ Jwarn will provide music throughout the evening on either side of the readings and Chef Yogi will have a pop up kitchen serving vegan and vegetarian Sri Lankan cuisine.
To help our 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.
Blue Pieta is a director, performer and dramaturg based in the UK. They were dramaturg for Thikra: Night of Remembering (2025) directed by Akram Khan. Bhanu Kapil is a poet based in Cambridge. Her first UK collection, How To Wash A Heart,won the TS Eliot Prize. Since 2022, Pieta and Kapil have performed in a succession of collective performances derived from Kapil’s poems and choreographed by Pieta. These performances have been featured in exhibition programming by Serpentine Galleries, Burley Fisher Literary Festival, The Place, The Horse Hospital, and the University of Cambridge.
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (US: Tin House, 2023; UK: the87press, 2025), named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Electric Lit and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she is currently based in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. Her poems have been published by the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, the Best American Experimental Poetry anthology, and Literature Wales, among other publications.
Omar Sakr is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the acclaimed author of the novel Son of Sin and three poetry collections, including The Lost Arabs, which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. His most recent collection, Non-Essential Work, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the ALS Gold Medal. His non-fiction work has been published widely, including in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald and SBS Life.
Safdar Ahmed is an award-winning artist, writer, musician and cultural worker. His graphic novel Still Alive won the Multicultural NSW Award and was named Book of the Year in the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Still Alive also won the 2022 Eve Pownall Award and a Gold Ledger in the 2022 Comic Arts Awards of Australia. Safdar is a founding member of the Refugee Art Project and a member of eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers.
Hannah Copley is the author of Speculum (Broken Sleep Books, 2021); and Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry, LUP, 2024). The latter, which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, won second prize in the 2024 Laurel Prize and was nominated for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize. She is a poetry editor at Stand and runs the regular Soho Poly Poetry night. Hannah's latest projects include Hertz, a collaborative zine with Alycia Pirmohamed for DIRT Plantable Poetry and 'Lotus Code', a new collaboration between jazz, visual, and digital artists from Japan and the UK. Hannah works is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster.
Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which is a Poetry Book Society (PBS) Recommendation, and Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and an Obsidian Foundation Fellow. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.
Kath Gifford is a vocalist/musician who has previously collaborated with Blue Pieta and Bhanu Kapil in the performances of “How To Wash A Heart” and “Omphalos”. Together as Hexess, Kath and Blue also create syncretic pan-British rituals (think chaotic dance-offs, drumming and bread fights) celebrating the many traditions of British peoples, both contemporary and historic, in counter to rising ethno-nationalism.
In a previous life, Kath played in Snowpony and Stereolab and still plays with Himmel.
