Rise Up! at The Bluebird Bakery York

Rise Up! is a monthly celebration of poetry, in a bakery (you get the name now, huh?), with invited guests and ‘lucky dip’ open mic. This month, hosts and Northern Writer Award winners Nicky Kippax and Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell are welcoming Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, supported by two exciting voices: Maya Caspari and Becca Drake.

Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer and Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York, recently reading at the PN Review celebration at John Rylands Library during Manchester Literature Festival 2023 and leading a series of events at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Their site-specific word and visual art includes responses to to the Ubatuba granite of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (2023) and Cornwall’s former capital, Launceston, as the Causley Trust Poet in Residence (2022), as well as to Scottish, Irish, and Caribbean built and natural environments. Their work has been recognised with the Cholmondeley Award and the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, and various publications include, most recently, Like a Tree, Walking (published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press in 2021) and A Happiness (Intergraphia, 2022).

Maya Caspari is a poet and lecturer in the Department of English & Related Literature at the University of York. Her poetry has been published in journals including Poetry Review, Ambit, Perverse and Butcher’s Dog. She has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition, shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize and was highly commended in the Forward Prizes.

Becca Drake is a poet and researcher based in York. She/they completed a PhD at the University of York (2023) and was poet-in-residence at the Hull Maritime Museum (2021). Her/their chapbook The Maritime Museum & The City (2023) is published with Thin Ice Press. Becca has poems in Reliquiae, Black Bough, Fly on the Wall, and was highly commended in the Hive Young Writers competition (2022).

As well as the three guests, the now regular on York’s scene offers three ‘lucky dip’ open mic slots to performers picked at random from those signed up. Rise Up! will finish with a book signing.