HOUSMANS READING SERIES: Valerie Hsiung with Verity Spott, Andrea Brady and others
Saturday, August 1, 2026 · 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Artists
We are delighted to welcome the incredible Valerie Hsiung to Housmans, visiting us from the mountains of Colorado in USA. Joining her we have some of the finest poets working in Britain today.
We will be celebrating Valerie’s latest book, The pedestrian: a poet’s novel, a body, a house, where childhood ungrieved meets the horror of displacement.
Emerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story, The pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma, the poet becomes a ritual detective, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo—courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement, The pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold—it listens as much as it speaks, attuned to forces beyond itself.
Amelia Zhou is a writer and researcher. Her book Repose, which interweaves poems, fiction, and lyric essay, was awarded the 2022 Wendy’s Subway Book Prize and published in 2024. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Cambridge, where her research examines the political-aesthetic role of photographic images and tropes in predominantly Anglophone life narratives from the 1970s to the present. She is also currently the Emerging Critics Fellow at the Sydney Review of Books. Born and raised in Sydney, she lives in London.
Azad Ashim Sharma is a writer and publisher based in South London. He is the director of the87press. His work includes Against the Frame (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). His work has featured in publications such as the Asian American Writers Workshop, Stand Magazine, Gutter Magazine, the journal Social and Health Sciences, SPAMzine, MIR Online, and Wasafiri. He is a Chase-funded PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award 2023. He lives in London.
Verity Spott is a poet, blogger, teacher, carer and musician from Brighton, England, and publisher of the independent publishing house Iodine Press. Verity’s books include Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband, 2017), Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press, 2018), Hopelessness (The 87 Press, 2020), Songs of the Morning (slub, 2023) and The North Road Songbook (Pilot Press, 2024). Since 2006, Spott has run the monthly poetry and performance event Horseplay in Brighton.
Andrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of eight books of poetry including, Desiring Machines, The Blue Split Compartments, The Strong Room, and Cut from the Rushes. She has performed in Europe, Canada, the US, Lebanon, and Chile, and has been invited to speak about poetry by the British Academy, British Council, the BBC, the Arts Council, and the Poetry Society. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, and Croatian.
Ghazal Mosadeq is a poet, editor and translator. She is the founder of Pamenar Press, an independent publisher of poetry, translation, hybrid and critical writing. Her own work has been published by Sheirsman, Fence, Arc Poetry, Firmament, Asymptote, Modern Poetry In Translation and Ugly Duckling Presse (forthcoming), among others. She is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
Valerie Hsiung is a poet who writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry, her books dissolve the borders of poetry, prose, performance and philosophy into a single listening body. She is the author of eight full-length books, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books), The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), and outside voices, please (CSU). Recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Camargo Foundation and Lighthouse Works as well as grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and PEN America, she teaches writing at the limits of language at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Her ceremonial work and pedagogy has been studied by researchers on the subject of emancipatory practices including Sophie Orlando. Born to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the foothills of Colorado.
We will be celebrating Valerie’s latest book, The pedestrian: a poet’s novel, a body, a house, where childhood ungrieved meets the horror of displacement.
Emerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story, The pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma, the poet becomes a ritual detective, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo—courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement, The pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold—it listens as much as it speaks, attuned to forces beyond itself.
Amelia Zhou is a writer and researcher. Her book Repose, which interweaves poems, fiction, and lyric essay, was awarded the 2022 Wendy’s Subway Book Prize and published in 2024. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Cambridge, where her research examines the political-aesthetic role of photographic images and tropes in predominantly Anglophone life narratives from the 1970s to the present. She is also currently the Emerging Critics Fellow at the Sydney Review of Books. Born and raised in Sydney, she lives in London.
Azad Ashim Sharma is a writer and publisher based in South London. He is the director of the87press. His work includes Against the Frame (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). His work has featured in publications such as the Asian American Writers Workshop, Stand Magazine, Gutter Magazine, the journal Social and Health Sciences, SPAMzine, MIR Online, and Wasafiri. He is a Chase-funded PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award 2023. He lives in London.
Verity Spott is a poet, blogger, teacher, carer and musician from Brighton, England, and publisher of the independent publishing house Iodine Press. Verity’s books include Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband, 2017), Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press, 2018), Hopelessness (The 87 Press, 2020), Songs of the Morning (slub, 2023) and The North Road Songbook (Pilot Press, 2024). Since 2006, Spott has run the monthly poetry and performance event Horseplay in Brighton.
Andrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of eight books of poetry including, Desiring Machines, The Blue Split Compartments, The Strong Room, and Cut from the Rushes. She has performed in Europe, Canada, the US, Lebanon, and Chile, and has been invited to speak about poetry by the British Academy, British Council, the BBC, the Arts Council, and the Poetry Society. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, and Croatian.
Ghazal Mosadeq is a poet, editor and translator. She is the founder of Pamenar Press, an independent publisher of poetry, translation, hybrid and critical writing. Her own work has been published by Sheirsman, Fence, Arc Poetry, Firmament, Asymptote, Modern Poetry In Translation and Ugly Duckling Presse (forthcoming), among others. She is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
Valerie Hsiung is a poet who writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry, her books dissolve the borders of poetry, prose, performance and philosophy into a single listening body. She is the author of eight full-length books, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books), The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), and outside voices, please (CSU). Recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Camargo Foundation and Lighthouse Works as well as grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and PEN America, she teaches writing at the limits of language at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Her ceremonial work and pedagogy has been studied by researchers on the subject of emancipatory practices including Sophie Orlando. Born to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the foothills of Colorado.