Join Romalyn Ante FRSL and Luisa A. Igloria for a reading and conversation to celebrate their new poetry collections, AGIMAT and CAULBEARER.

Romalyn Ante FRSL is a Filipino-British poet, essayist, and editor. She was born and bred in Lipa, Philippines. She was 16 years old when her mother – a nurse in the NHS – brought the family to the UK. Her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto, 2020), was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She is the co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language. She was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2021-2022, sits on the editorial board for Poetry London magazine, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in the West Midlands where she works as a registered NHS nurse and psychotherapist, specialising in the mental healthcare of young people. AGIMAT, forthcoming with Chatto & Windus in September, has been selected as Poetry Book Society Autumn Recommendation.

During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded Luisa A. Igloria one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021 to support a program of public poetry projects. Luisa is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 11 other books. In 2015, she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey selected her chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask as the 2018 recipient of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize. She is lead editor, along with Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the U.S. (Paloma Press, 2023). Her poems appear in national and international anthologies, and print and online literary journals including The Georgia Review, Cincinnati Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Missouri Review, Rattle, Poetry East, Your Impossible Voice, Poetry, Shanghai Literary Review, Cha, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. A Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing, she teaches in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University,She also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. www.luisaigloria.com