Lilac Cube
About
Lilac Cube is a contemporary poetry reading series, based in Leamington Spa. The series is generously funded by the Poetry @ Warwick research centre and the Leverhulme Trust, in association with Dr Mae Losasso's research on breath poetics. Scroll down for upcoming events and details of past events, and follow @lilac.cube on Instagram. For any queries relating to this series, contact mae.losasso@warwick.ac.uk
Series design by Seán Purdy.
Upcoming!
Lilac Cube #04 will take place on Tuesday 4th November 2025 at 5pm at The Mead GalleryLink opens in a new window in the Warwick Arts Centre. This special event will feature readings from luminaries of contemporary American and British poetry, Jeanne Heuving and Robert Hampson, as well as an opportunity to see 'Tea Bowl Punk'Link opens in a new window, a new exhibition of works by Japanese ceramic artist Takuro Kuwata. Heuving's and Hampson's readings will include new poems commissioned in response to Kuwata’s work. Entry is free, and so are the drinks
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Jeanne Heuving is a poet and scholar based at the University of Washington Bothell. She was the 2021-2022 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Her most recent poetry collection Indigo Angel (Black Square Editions, 2023) takes its lead from different jazz modalities as these ray out into other arts, the natural world and human history. Her cross-genre book Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a 2004 Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic. She is the editor of Nathaniel Mackey, Destination Out: Essays on His Work (U of Iowa Press, 2021), and the co-editor, with Tyrone Williams, of Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry (Recencies Series, University of New Mexico Press, 2019).
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Robert Hampson has been involved in the field of contemporary innovative poetry since the 1970s as an editor, critic and practitioner. His poetry has appeared in a range of magazines including The Wolf, Tentacular, Pamenar Press, Long Poem Magazine and Rewilding: An Ecopoetic Anthology (2020). Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems, 1973-1998 was published by Stride (2001). He is best-known for Seaport (Shearsman, 2008). Recent publications include Covodes 1-19 (Artery Editions, 2021), Reworked Disasters (Kfs 2013), and An Explanation of Colours (Veer, 2010).
News
A feature on Lilac Cube recently appeared in The Boar co-authored by third-year English Literature students, Imaan Aziz and Aram Akbari-Madovi. They write:
"Tucked away under a bridge on the east side of Leamington Spa lies both South Bound Café and Windmill Brewery. Home to fine distilleries, select jazz music and, most importantly, on a very special evening every term or so, a selection of poets brought to you by the Lilac Cube. Launched in November 2024, Lilac Cube, named after John Ashbery’s poem ‘They Dream Only of America,’ is a series of contemporary poetry readings. Ashbery’s experimental poem crafts a dissociative and awakening experience, fusing dream and reality, an experience that is replicated with the events of the Lilac Cube..."
Click hereLink opens in a new window to read the full article.
Past Events
Lilac Cube #03 took place on Tuesday the 20th of May 2025 at Southbound Café-Bar in Leamington Spa, and featured readings from Stephen Collis, Annie Lafleur, and Steven Seidenberg.
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Stephen Collis is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, includingThe Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winningOn the Material (2010), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. The Middle, the second volume in a trilogy, was published in October 2024, and Knock Down House, an experimental memoir, was published by Pamenar Press in 2025. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
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Annie Lafleur is a writer, researcher and editor specializing in the fine arts. At Le Quartanier, she has published a writing cycle consisting of four books, the most recent of which, Puberté (2023), won the Prix francophone international at the Festival de la poésie de Montréal, the Grand Prix Québecor at the Festival international de la poésie de Trois-Rivières, and a nomination for the Prix Alain-Grandbois from the Académie des lettres du Québec. Also critically acclaimed, Ciguë (2019) and Bec-de-lièvre (2016) were finalists for the Prix des libraires du Québec and the Governor General's Literary Awards. She lives between Quebec City, Montreal and Vancouver.
Lilac Cube #02 took place on Thursday the 24th of April 2024 at Windmill Hill Brewery in Leamington Spa and featured readings by CAConrad, Holly Pester and Isabel Galleymore.
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CAConradhas worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88
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Holly Pester is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre, University of Essex. Her books and works include Ecloques for Idle Workers (BBC Radio and Distance No Object, 2018), Comic Timing (Granta, 2021) and The Lodgers (Granta, 2024).
Isabel Galleymore’s second poetry collection is Baby Schema (Carcanet 2024). Her poems have featured in the New York Review of Books, theTLS and Poetry. In 2023-24, she was a Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.She is an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham.
Lilac Cube #01 took place on Thursday the 24th of April 2024 at Southbound Café-Barin Leamington Spa and featured readings from Jonathan Skinner, Betsy Porritt and Sam Weselowski.
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Jonathan Skinner is a poet, editor, translator, and critic, known for founding the journal ecopoetics. His poetry collections include The Archive (Gong Farm, 2024), Chip Calls (Little Red Leaves, 2014), Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011), Warblers (Albion Books, 2010), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He has published numerous essays at the intersection of poetry, ecology, activism, landscape and sound studies—most recently on Documentary Environmental Poetics for the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics (2023) and on Joanne Kyger’s Eco-Dharma for Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger (Clemson University Press, 2024). He recently completed an essay for the forthcoming volume, Will Alexander’s Poetics (Palgrave, 2025), discussing the cosmopolitics of the poet’s 300-page poem written in the voice of the world’s largest hummingbird, the Andean Hillstar. He teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
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Betsy Porritt is a poet and literary scholar from Devon. She currently teaches interdisciplinary theory and practice at the University of Birmingham. Her poems, collages, and sound works are online and in print journals including: Still Point, Ludd Gang, Stride Mag, Free Verse, Now I Know, Daylight, The Graveside Orations of Carl Einstein, DATABLEED X, SPAM001, Amberflora 10, Me & My Friends, and Assembly. Her chapbooks include A Mediated and Partial Zone, published by Guillemot Press and, more recently, Oh Unquenchable Thirst, published by the small press Distance No Object. She lives and works in the West Midlands. Betsy's poems have been published in print and online. Her latest chapbook, Oh Unquenchable Thirst is available now from the small press Distance No Object. She lives and works in the West Midlands.
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