To celebrate the launch of the new collection C+nto & Othered Poems, we’re offering you the chance to win two tickets to the sold-out launch event, as well as a meet and greet with Joelle Taylor herself.

We’ll be running the competition on social media between 20-24th September*

  • Like and share the tweet/Instagram post to enter
  • If you post your copy of C+nto, you can pose with it too if you like, and you’ll get double the chances to win.

We’ll draw the winner at random and contact you via social media so please follow our accounts and keep those DMs open for us to slide on in…

*Please note, due to the nature of the event all entrants must 18yrs+. If you enter and you are not over 18, we will discount your entry.

About C+nto

A few years ago we commissioned Joelle Taylor to perform a new piece at Rallying Cry on the theme of protest, a night that asked the artists to address the state of the nation and imagine a better tomorrow.

It starts with something global – homosexuality and queerness – and focuses in toward my own experiences as a masculine presenting woman – aka Butch or Boi – in London’s 90s underground scene. CUNTO focuses the narrative on a fictitious bar called The Maryville – an amalgam of the many spaces that provided home to me – a bar, a community centre, a family, a riot. It is a book about community, friendship, grief and identity. It is the story of the hidden.

Leading on from this, Joelle went on to write and publish her new works: C+nto & Othered Poems under Saqi Books, and in December 2020, we asked Joelle to put together a blog piece during the writing process. You can read this post under our ‘Read’ section of the website (at the time of writing, the title of the book was different).

C+unto & Othered Poems has now been published with a launch party happening on 7 Oct 2021 at The Book Club in Shoreditch. The event has now sold out but there is a waiting list.

The Book Launch

Joelle will be joined by chair Erica Gillingham, poet, writer, bookseller at Gay’s The Word Bookshop and Books Editor for DIVA Magazine. 

C+nto & Othered Poems enters the private lives of women from the butch counterculture, telling the inside story of the protests they led in the ’90s to reclaim their bodies as their own, and their difficult balance between survival and self-expression. History, magic, rebellion, party and sermon vibrate through Joelle’s cantos to uncover these underground communities forged by women. Part-memoir and part-conjecture, this collection explores sexuality and gender in poetry that is lyrical, expansive, imagistic, epic and intimate. C+nto is a love poem, a riot, a late night, and an honouring.

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet, playwright and author. A former UK slam champion, she founded SLAMbassadors, the UK’s youth slam championships, in 2001 and was the Artistic Director and National Coach until 2018. Taylor is a fellow of the RSA and the host and co-curator of Out-Spoken, the UK’s premier poetry and music club, currently resident at the Southbank Centre. Taylor is widely anthologised, and is the author of three poetry collections, three plays and a collection of short stories, The Night Alphabet (forthcoming). Her documentary Butch was recently featured on BBC Radio 4.