In her book C+NTO & Othered Poems, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet, playwright, and author Joelle Taylor explores the lives of the women at the forefront of 1990s butch lesbian counter-culture.

Described as ‘part memoir and part conjecture’, this new work takes us inside the underground communities and protests that helped a sub-culture of women reclaim their bodies as their own.

In this truly unique one-woman-book-show, Taylor will tell the story of C+NTO, via sexuality, gender and rebellion.

 

About The Poet

Joelle Taylor Headshot

Joelle Taylor

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet, playwright and author. Taylor founded SLAMbassadors, the UK’s national youth slam championships, for the Poetry Society in 2001, and was its Artistic Director and National Coach until 2018. She is the host and co-curator of Out-Spoken, the UK’s Centre’s premier poetry and music club, resident at the Southbank Centre Purcell Room. Taylor is the author of three poetry collections, three plays, and a collection of short stories, The Night Alphabet (forthcoming). She is widely anthologised and her work is taught as part of the OCR GCSE syllabus. A Radio 4 documentary about her work, Butch, was broadcast in 2020. She has also featured on The Verb R3, Power Lines R4, Poetry Please Radio 4, Educating the East End (ITV), and We Belong Here (BBC).Taylor is a Fellow of the RSA, received a Change Maker Award from the Southbank Centre in recognition of the impact SLAMbassadors has had on British culture, and was longlisted for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2017 and 2019.