Pride Poetry Picks with Polly and Todd

We're really delighted to be kicking off Pride month with this wonderful evening of queer poetry reading with Polly Wright and Todd Jennings!

It used to be that Queer Love was the Love that dare not speak its name, but. not any more! Join performer and writer Todd and Polly as they share their Pride Poetry Picks, ranging from Sappho to Oscar Wilde to Jackie Kay, Kae Tempest, Ocean Vuong, and Andrew Macmillan...followed by a good chat about favourite poetry with the audience! 

Polly Wright is a theatre director, occasional performer, facilitator, writer, lecturer, and researcher. She co-founded Women and Theatre in Birmingham, where she co-wrote and performed  in many cabaret sketches and plays. She is now the artistic director of the Hearth Centre, which is a centre for Health Education and the Humanities with Art at the Heart, for which she has been the sole playwright of 8 plays, all of which have been professionally produced. www.thehearthcentre.org.uk

She has published 6 short stories and five poems in various anthologies in addition to academic articles. She is currently working on a novel which is based on her own family history, which has emerged from her play Friends of Enemies, and is set in Wales in WW2. Her short story of the same name will be published as part of the anthology to celebrate 40 years of Tindal St Fiction Group in the autumn of this year.

Polly identifies as a gay woman and has lived with her civil partner for over thirty years in Kings Heath! She has loved literature all her life and connects it very strongly with her own well being, and is the leader of the Writers’ Reading Group at the Midlands Arts Centre.

Todd Jennings is an actor, facilitator, interpreter and translator from Kings Heath. Working extensively with Birmingham based companies The Hearth Centre, Women and Theatre and Cloud Cuckoo Land, he has run drama workshops to promote wellbeing, devised new work for performance and acted in many plays including Revolving Door (Hearth), Knife Act (Hearth), Ariel on a cliff (Cloud Cuckoo Land), Anita and me (The Birmingham Rep) and U&Me (Catcher Media).

Fluent in Spanish and Italian, Todd Works professionally as an interpreter and translator in both languages. Notably, he translated excerpts of Antonio Castro’s Homosexualidad y teatro en España by permission of the Spanish Academy of Scenic Arts, turning his hand to translating the poetry and verse of Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Lorca into English.

Todd Identifies as a gay man and proud Brummie. Literature and poetry have always played an important role in his life and work, from school to the present, be it through reading for pleasure, performance or translation. 

We hope you can join us!