Language Garden
Saturday, March 29
5pm
at David Horvitz’s 7th Ave. Garden
1911 7th Ave. Los Angeles, CA
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Language Garden presents a spring reading featuring four poets from Scotland and their American friend: Maria Sledmere, Rosa Campbell, Oli Hazzard, Nat Raha, and Elisabeth Houston.
Followed by short films curated by Valentina Rosset,
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Maria Sledmere’s work addresses issues of ecology, energy, gender, dreams and digital aesthetics. Recent books include the experimental monograph Midsummer Song (Hypercritique) (Tenement Press, 2024) and poetry collection, Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024). Her first book, The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021), was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award 2022. Languishing, cute, a book of Celtic sci-fi poetry co-written with Ian Macartney, is forthcoming in spring 2025 and a novella, The Indigo Hours, in autumn. Maria is director of post-internet publisher SPAM Press, one half of the performance duo Project Somnolence and a Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.
Rosa Campbell is a writer and academic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She’s a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews—where she teaches modern and contemporary literature, specialising in poetry, poetics, gender and queer stuff—and a Houghton Library Visiting Fellow at Harvard. She’s the author of Pothos, a lyric essay/memoir about grief and houseplants (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and the editor of The Miraculous Season: The Selected Poems of V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang (Carcanet, 2024). She’s currently working on a critical biography of Lang and a project on the poetics of failure.
Oli Hazzard is the author of three books of poems, including Sleepers Awake (Carcanet, 2024; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and a novel, Lorem Ipsum (Prototype, 2021). He runs a small publisher with Sophie Collins, called Mouse Press. He lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of St Andrews.
Nat Raha is a poet, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her poetry is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) and of sirens, body & faultlines. Her performance work, epistolary (on carceral islands) was co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023. With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), and the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’, published in Social Text.
Elisabeth Houston is an “artist” and “writer.” They also go by “baby” and “not baby” and EL_S_TH H__ST_ON and other words which designate other forms of erasure. Standard American English came out in 2022 with Litmus Press; her second poetry collection Paper Fantasy will come out in 2025. Follow their work at elisabethisonline.com.
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The Language Garden Reading Series is programmed by Corina Copp, Sophia Le Fraga, & Joseph Mosconi, with interventions/germinations from David Horvitz.