This workshop will take place before our celebration of André Naffis-Sahely’s most recent collection, High Desert, at 7pm.

‘Writing About Labour Rights’: this workshop will instruct participants on how the labour movement has been written about by workers themselves, taking a specific look at the poetry written in the wake of the Brisbee Deportation of 1917, when 1,200 striking miners and their families were banished from a copper town in the southern mountains of Arizona. How do we craft class-aware poems that can fit into the notion of social poetics?

André Naffis-Sahely is the author or two collections of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He also co-edited Mick Imlah: Selected Prose (Peter Lang, 2015) and The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB Editions, 2013).

He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Abdellatif Laâbi, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. He is a Lecturer at the University of California, Davis in the US and the editor of Poetry London in the UK.