Join us for our final event of the 2023-24 season, featuring a star-studded poetical line-up plus the last opportunity until September – September! – to be in with a chance of winning the SP lemon drizzle cake. With readings from Sasha Dugdale, Maya C. Popa and Lesley Wheeler & music from the super cool Self-Righteous Brothers, you’d be crazy not to be there. Juggle your existing plans if you have existing plans, peeps: it’s going to be a good one! Further details below … 🌟💜💚❤️🌟
The When & the Where:
Thursday 27th June 2024
7:45pm – 9:15pm (doors open 7:30pm)
The Waverley Bar, 3-5 St Mary’s St, Edinburgh EH1 1TA
Admission: Our standard entrance charges are £7.50 (waged) and £5 (concession). This includes one raffle ticket, which will also be your receipt of entry. For those keen to increase their chances of a raffle win, we’ve also introduced a Golden Ticket: at £10, this covers entry plus five raffle tickets. Entry is payable by either card or cash, but it’s worth bringing the latter so as not to miss the chance to buy a book from one of our readers.
*Please not that, as we have three guest readers for the June event, there won’t be any open mic slots this month.
The Readers:
SASHA DUGDALE
Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is The Strongbox, published by Carcanet (UK) in 2024. Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem ‘Joy’ won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova’s prose work In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of Stepanova’s poetry collections and work by a number of Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva. For many years she specialised in translating Russian-language new writing for theatres in the UK and US, including the New York Public Theater and the UK’s Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.
MAYA C. POPA
Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton/Picador) named one of the Guardian’s best recent books of poetry, and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, and was previously a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University, where she received her MA. The Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly, she teaches poetry at NYU and runs Conscious Writers Collective, an online writing community for rigorous and supportive writing mentorship for those seeking guidance beyond the scope of traditional degrees.
LESLEY WHEELER
Lesley Wheeler, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of the forthcoming Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming. Wheeler’s work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop; her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.
Signing up for the Open Mic:
We have four open mic spots each month. These are booked in advance. To request an open mic spot in the future, please email us at shorepoetsedinburgh @ gmail.com (remove the spaces)
The Raffle:
Entry includes a raffle ticket; additional tickets are also available to buy when you arrive, should you wish to increase your chances of winning this month’s scrummy lemon cake. Or you can boost the odds of snaffling that piece of home-baked glory by purchasing one of our new Golden Tickets (further details above, under ‘The When & the Where’). The raffle also frequently boasts other no less wonderful but definitely less edible prizes, in the form of pamphlets or books.
See you there!
Shore Poets 
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