May Exiled Lit Cafe
Wednesday 21st May 2025 at 7 pm

Rhyme and Reason: Queer Voices in Verse

Aryam Marafi – Cat Chong – Leo Boix – Roberto Salvador Cenciarelli – Anna Blasiak – Sofia Vaisman Maturana

Curated and hosted by Sana Nassari
poet, translator and EWI committee member

Aryam Marafi (she/her) is an aroace and queer Kuwaiti refugee. She is also a medical student, a writer, a poet, and a community organiser with a focus on supporting victims of domestic violence.

Cat Chong is a poet, essayist, and publisher who completed their PhD in medical humanities at NTU, Singapore as a Nanyang President’s Graduate Scholar in 2024. Their publications include Plain Air: An Apology in Transit (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), 712 stanza homes for the sun (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), and Dear Lettera 32 (Permeable Barrier, 2024). They are a co-founder of the Crested Tit Collective, the digital editor at Osmosis Press, and an editorial assistant at Pamenar Press. They also work in London as a cheesemonger.

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet born in Argentina who lives and works in London and Deal, Kent, UK. His debut English collection Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix has been included in many anthologies. He is co-director of Un Nuevo Sol, a scheme to nurture new voices of Latinx writers in the UK, an advisory board member of the Poetry Translation Centre and a board member of Magma Poetry. He was the recipient of the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize, the Keats-Shelley Prize, a PEN Award, and The Society of Authors’ Foundation and K. Blundell Trust.

Roberto Salvador Cenciarelli is an Italian poet of Chilean origins based in London. He is the winner of the Verve Poetry Competition 2025 and the Pat Kavanagh Prize 2025. His work has been shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize 2024 and has appeared in Propel Magazine, Seaford Review, Berlin Lit, Oblique House and fourteen poems.

Anna Blasiak is a poet, translator and managing editor of the European Literature Network. She has published two bilingual poetry and photography books (with Lisa Kalloo) Kawiarnia przy St James’s Wrena w porze lunchu / Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime and Deliverance / Rozpętanie. She also published a book-length interview, Lili. Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation in Anna Blasiak. Her translation of Maciej Hen’s “According to Her” was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize in 2023. Recently her translation of Radosław Wiśniewski’s “Psalm to Saint Sabina” won the inaugural Trafika Europe’s Andrew Singer Prize for Verse. Anna regularly reviews books in translation for the ELN, where she also runs a monthly poetry column Poetry Travels and a blog devoted to Polish literature The Polka. She is one of the editors of Babiniec Literacki.

Sofia Vaisman Maturana (Santiago, Chile, 1993). Poet and Doctor in Music Composition from King’s College London. Holds a diploma in Creative Writing from Universidad Diego Portales. In 2015, she published Pasillos de tiempos precoces (Planeta de Papel, Chile), a collection of poems about the transition to adolescence; and in 2018, No le pongamos nombre a lo nuestro (Puntos Suspensivos Ediciones, Argentina), a poetry collection exploring her identity as a lesbian woman. She translated Judy Grahn’s A Woman is Talking to Death into Spanish (Editorial Monada, Argentina, 2024), and is about to publish Las Elegidas (Profana Press, London, 2025). She co-founded the women’s orchestra One Orchestra New in London, where she’s currently based. Much of her work as a composer focuses on setting poetry written by women to music.

49 Great Ormond Street
London WC1N 3HZ
(Russell Square or Holborn tube stations)

£4 for 2025 Exiled Writers Ink Members
£6 for others
Book by Eventbrite or Cash only on the door
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/exiled-writers-ink-presents-rhyme-and-reason-queer-voices-in-verse-tickets-1358457455819?aff=oddtdtcreator&_gl