NINA MINGYA POWLES
READING + IN CONVERSATION WITH MARIA SLEDMERE
WEDNESDAY 15 FEBRUARY, 6.30PM

You can watch a recording of our early evening reading event with writers Nina Mingya Powles and Maria Sledmere below. 

Nina Mingya Powles has a residency at Cample in February.

Nina Mingya Powles is a zinemaker, writer and librarian from Aotearoa New Zealand. Magnolia 木蘭, her debut poetry collection, was published in 2020 and shortlisted in the Forward Prizes and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is also the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons (2020), and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water (2021). Nina has made numerous small poetry zines and teaches zinemaking and poetry workshops. She is the founder of small press Bitter Melon, which publishes limited-edition, risograph printed poetry pamphlets and poem broadsides by poets from the Asian diaspora, and she writes an occasional e-newsletter called Comfort Food.

Maria Sledmere is an artist and poet, and a lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Strathclyde. She is a member of A+E Collective and editor-in-chief of SPAM Press. Maria’s publications include infra•structure (with Katy Lewis Hood, Broken Sleep). Her poem ‘Ariosos for Lavish Matter’ was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prize, and her work was also included in makar / unmakar (Tapsalteerie, 2019), an anthology of contemporary poets in Scotland.

‘These are poems of ‘warm blue longing’ and understated beauty, poems to linger over, taste, and taste again. As Powles searches for home she leaves an ‘imprint of rain’ in your dreams’. 

Alison Wong

‘Throughout Tiny Moons the past mingles with the present, tempting the reader with the aromas, tastes and textures of the many dishes and snacks that Powles writes about so exquisitely and tenderly.’ 

Chris Tse

‘With poetic precision, Nina Mingya Powles shows us what nature writing can be, braiding place, food, family, migration and all their legacies. This is non-fiction at its most dynamic, its most transporting. I will keep this book close by and return to it often’

Jessica J. Lee