WORD! Online with Antony Owen and Mellow Baku

  • This PAST event happened on: Thu, May 27, 2021

  • Venue:Online
  • Time:7:30pm
  • Cost:Free
  • Main Contact:Lydia Towsey
  • Web Address:https://bit.ly/3fsDoF0
  • Join us on Zoom and Facebook Live for our next big WORD!Online - as ever this last Thursday of the month.

    Hosted by Lydia Towsey; featuring the award winning Antony Owen, supported by acclaimed Mellow Baku, with slick beats from DJ Hiro - and we hope you!

    To sign up for the open mic, drop us a line via [email protected] - we'd love to hear from you.

    Free to attend. Donations via the 'donate button' on www.wordpoetry.co.uk gratefully received and will support our work in partnership with Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust.

    A WORD! on our features...

    ANTHONY OWEN is an award winning poet, author of eight collections and one of the leading active writers on war and peace poetry in 21st century poetry. His last collection, The Nagasaki Elder was shortlisted for the coveted Ted Hughes Award. Other prizes include the Bread Roses Working Class Writing Award, 2020 - his pamphlet, Margaret Thatcher's Museum was praised by Ken Loach. Antony’s work is taught at regular poetry workshops in Hiroshima and also appears in a national UK peace education resource by CND Peace Education. His latest collection, Cov Kids is published by Knives, Forks and Spoons, May 2021. His eighth collection, Phoenix will be launched 01/07/2021 in Germany.

    Praise for ANTONY OWEN'S just out book, Cov Kids:

    "Here, we are reminded that poetry is more than the ivory towers of academia. Writing a parable of the working-class, Antony Owen has written a text perfectly placed in the anti-colonial fight in education … dismantling race and class in the ruins of empire. Truly a master stroke of poetry that every person on GCSE, A-Level and university English courses needs to study."

    – Tre Ventour"

    "Antony Owen takes us back to his adolescence in Coventry; to Park Lane nightclub ‘where posh girls licked salt from our piss stained hands.’ These poems are odes to youth and pop music, lyrical and lippy, full of fag-butts in urinals and gum-grey bras. They filled my heart and left me ‘drowning in the landfill of first light."

    – Luke Wright

    ***

    MELLOW BAKU was born in London to a Blues singing hippie and Trinidadian Rastafarian activist writer and actor and moved to the Midlands as a child, raised in a religious cult age 5 –19. She escaped to study art in Leicester, and has been exploring ways of healing, finding and shedding identity and sharing through creativity ever since.

    As a writer and performer of songs, poetry and plays, Mellow has gigged in venues throughout UK and internationally for 15 years, including venues in Switzerland, Denmark and New York, and at London Southbank. Her work has received airplay on BBC Radio.

    Praise for MELLOW BAKU:

    “A must for all”

    – Courtney Pine OBE

    "Mellow Baku has the compelling voice and self composure of some one who is destined to be big internationally"

    – 69 Magazine

    "Whether in local bars, community spaces, concert venues in London or gigs in New York, Mellow sees performances as magical opportunities for people including herself to connect, share, provoke and explore."

    – EM Jazz

    *

    Supported by Arts Council England and University of Leicester, U.Matter.

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