Celebration of Queer Poetry

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Fleche, which won the 2019 Costa Poetry Award and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.

In 2021, Fleche was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Chan is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University.

Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan’s luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. 

Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day.

Questioning and redefining what we mean by a ‘queer’ poem, you’ll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard.

It moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves.

And now Mary Jean joins us with a host of brilliant poets such as Keith Jarrett, Erica Gillingham and Caleb Parkin for an evening celebrating contemporary Queer poetry, and the power of Queer voices throughout history. Join us!