An Evening of Poetry with the87press

We are thrilled to be hosting an evening of poetry with the87press's Emily Lee Luan, Megan Pinto and Annie Wenstrup. We will also be joined by Edinburgh-based poet Alycia Pirmohamed.

Traversing personal histories, relationships and language in its finest details, each of these poets offers an insight into the capabilities of modern verse. It is sure to be night not to miss!

Each "Includes Book" voucher is fully redeemable against the following books: 回 / Return by Emily Lee Luan, Saints of Little Faith by Megan Pinto and The Museum of Unnatural Histories by Annie Wenstrup.

Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return, a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and forthcoming with the87press in the UK, and I Watch the Boughs (2021), selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. She teaches at Adelphi University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, published by the87press (2025, UK) and Four Way Books (2024,US). Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.

Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories and a 2025 Whiting Award recipient. She held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from The CIRI Foundation. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water. Her other works include Hinge, Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative work, Second Memory, which was co-authored by Pratyusha. Her nonfiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing and is forthcoming with Canongate. Alycia currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s at the University of Cambridge. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network and a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics, and she is the recipient of several awards including a Pushcart Prize, the CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

About 回 / Return: Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese "reversible" poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back-toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?

About Saints of Little Faith: The energies animating Megan Pinto's electrifying debut are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Fierce and intimate, this poet's meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness.

About The Museum of Unnatural Histories: This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to "decide/who you must become."