BLIND(cite) x Mantissa Poetry Review

Sean West, Raynen Bajette O’Keefe, Guido Melo, Josephine Mead

2nd Sept. 2021

This event brings together contributors from Mantissa's inaugural issue, with readings from Sean West, Josephine Mead, Guido Melo, and Raynen Bajette O’Keefe, alongside a discussion of poetics and practice.

Mantissa Poetry Review is a printed creative publication based in Naarm, bringing together a collection of works that aim to celebrate writing as an experimental and real experience. Their inaugural issue is a hot conglomeration of mindscapes, deviations, visual poetry, prose and verse. It is a collection of writing that aims to stretch the genre in a variety of forms.

This event, exploring practice and poetics emerges from BLIND(cite), bringing together a series of programs exploring referents, processes and entanglements. The artists, writers, thinkers and practitioners brought together through this notion of the citation will engage performance, readings, cacophonies of speaking and experimental pedagogies, in considering what it might mean to sift through and turn toward all that which informs practice.

Join Zoom Meeting
Thursday 2 September, 6pm

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87856765489

Meeting ID: 878 5676 5489

Raynen Bajette O’Keefe/Amos

is an artist and writer, living and working on unceded Wangal Land. They hold a BA in Film Studies and inhabit the peripheries of dance, somatics, community work, digital media, film, and writing. They have participated in group shows and performances, and their writing-based work has recently been published with Mantissa Poetry Review, The Emerging Writers’ Festival, Scum, Red Room Poetry, Dancehouse Diary, and others.

Sean West

is a Meanjin-based poet, disability support worker, and workshop facilitator. He has received an Arts Queensland Individuals Fund grant in 2021 and has been shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize in 2021, 2020 and 2019. He is the founding editor of Blue Bottle Journal.

Find him at www.callmemariah.com.

Guido Melo

is an Afro-Brazilian-Latinx multilingual author and poet based in Naarm (Melbourne). Currently undertaking a Bachelor of Arts in Writing & Digital Media at Victoria University, his words can be found in Meanjin Quarterly, Kill Your Darlings Magazine, Peril Magazine, Colournary Magazine, Mantissa Poetry, Ascension Magazine, SBS Voices, SBS Portuguese, Cordite, Voz Limpia, Alma Preta Jornalismo and Guia Negro News. Guido is a member of the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, a columnist for Negrê and a contributor to Growing Up African in Australia (Black Inc., 2019) and Racism: Stories on Fear, Hate & Bigotry (Sweatshop, 2021).

Josephine Mead

is a visual artist, writer and curator, interested in personal notions of support. Working at the intersections of poetry, photography, sculpture, installation and sound, she is currently interested in considering the body as a site of discursive practice, exploring notions of deep listening, and examining the temporal and sonic nature of writing and photography. She has exhibited widely in Australia and abroad and has undertaken residency programs in rural Victoria, Mexico, Portugal, Turkey and Germany. She is a current studio artist at Collingwood Yards, Artistic Director for Blindside Gallery and co-founder of Co- Publishing.