Unravelling History & The Material of Living

Join four poets for a reading that delves into the myriad personal and collective worlds, where you find stories of survival and loss; of ecological crisis and the material of living; memories of the sensous in all its skin and glitter; and the complexity of our inner selves.

On Saturday 23 May at The Community Works at 7pm, poets Mona Arshi, Troy Cabida, Nina Mingya Powles and Jennifer Wong will be sharing work from their recent collections.

Tickets are £5 (£2 concessions) - please book tickets in advance!

The building is accessible, but if you have any specific access needs, please drop us an email at oxfordpoetrylibrary@gmail.com beforehand.

Mona Arshi’s debut poetry collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection, Dear Big Gods, was published in 2019 and her novel Somebody Loves You in 2021. She has been appointed as Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool and Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is also co-editor of an anthology of nature poetry, Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (Faber, 2025). Her third collection of Poetry Mouth was published in 2025 by Chatto. Prior to her career in poetry, she worked as a human rights lawyer, often representing refugees and women fleeing domestic violence.

Troy Cabida is the author of Neon Manila (2025), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His pamphlets include War Dove (2020) and Symmetric of Bone: poems after Elsa Peretti (2024), a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.

Nina Mingya Powles is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer and poet based in London. She is the author of several poetry collections and pamphlets, most recently In the Hollow of the Wave (2024), Magnolia 木蘭 (2020) and two books of creative nonfiction, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) and Small Bodies of Water (2021). She writes a monthly e-newsletter on food and memory called Crispy Noodles.

Jennifer Wong: author of Light Year (Nine Arches Press, 2026) and 回家 Letters Home (Nine Arches Press, 2020) which received the PBS recommendation, and pamphlets including time difference (Verve, 2024).