A Horse, Not Jumping: On Refusals, an online poetry workshop with Victoria Adukwei Bulley

What is refusal? What terms of the world might refusal seek to reject, and what does it demand of us as writers and readers? Spending time with poems from Fady Joudah’s recent collection […] (Out-Spoken Press, 2024) alongside Lola Olufemi’s text 'Notes on Refusal', participants of this workshop will experiment with techniques including acts of (un)naming, (re)definition, blackout and redaction as a means of understanding how refusal works as a poetics on the page, as well as how such writing calls beyond itself towards social action.

*Refusal in horse riding is the failure of a horse to jump a fence to which it is presented. This includes any stop in forward motion.

This is part of an ongoing series of workshops with Victoria Adukwei Bulley, an award-winning poet who we continue to learn with and are inspired by. All fees from this workshop go directly to Victoria and we encourage you to receive this warm welcome by either attending or sharing with like-minded others.

Victoria is donating 50% of her fee to Makan, a charity aimed at strengthening the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer, and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber in the UK and in North America by Alfred A. Knopf.

Established in 2018, the87press is an Asian, LGBTQIA+, and neurodiverse led publishing collective and events curator in South London. We prioritize modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and environmentalism in our print publications of poetry, fiction, and essays. Additionally, we offer educational and creative workshops, industry leading live events, and regular commissioned work with online journal of culture th