Joelle Taylor: Enter MARYVILLE

In an exclusive Queer Bath event, T. S. Eliot and Polari Prize-winning poet Joelle Taylor joins Manganaro for an intimate in-conversation event exploring dyke counterculture with her powerful new collection 'Maryville,' published by Bloomsbury.

Enter the world of MARYVILLE, an old butch bar in a snow globe. Joelle Taylor performs, uniting her award winning book C+NTO and the follow up MARYVILLE, following the lives of 4 butch friends over 50 years of resistance and rebellion.

With a vividly drawn cast of characters, Maryville uses the butch bar as a lens through which to examine the underground histories of queer London. Across fifty years of resistance and rebellion, Taylor traces the lives of four butch friends navigating love, violence, community and survival in awe-inspiring high definition language, a collection as filmic as it is familiar.

Together, Taylor and Manganaro will explore dyke counterculture, queer archives, memory, protest and the act of conjuring lost spaces back into being. The conversation will also touch on Taylor’s landmark collection C+NTO, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Polari Prize, a work that redefined contemporary queer poetry.

A night that honours both the scars and the joy of queer community, and the bars, streets and friendships that made survival possible. 

Following the discussion there will be an audience Q&A

This event is in collaboration with the Holburne Museum Up Late.

About Joelle Taylor:
Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors, and is being adapted for the theatre. Her novel The Night Alphabet was published in 2024 and named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was honoured with a DIVA Award for Outstanding Contribution and named Guardian’s Pride Power list. Her collection Maryville was recently published by Bloomsbury.

‘Taylor's poetry is as dangerous as it is dexterous… A wildfire blazing free’ Bernardine Evaristo