The Poetry Society is delighted to present the launch readings for the Summer 2025 issue of The Poetry Review, edited by Wayne Holloway-Smith, with guest readers Kaveh Akbar (video), Bonnie Hancell, Jacob Polley and Martha Sprackland.

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian American poet, novelist and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell and of the novel Martyr!, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Iowa and Poetry Editor of The Nation. In 2024, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Bonnie Hancell is a poet/artist from Northern England. She often uses creative practice as therapy for ongoing struggles with mental illness and as catharsis for trauma/survivorship. Her poetry has been included in anthologies by Easter Road Press, Poet’s Hardship Fund and Pilot Press and featured in periodicals The Rialto, The Poetry Review and LUDD GANG. Her first chapbook was published by Gog Farm in 2022. Her short collection In This Allegory (Where We Disappear) was published by Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers press in 2024.

Jacob Polley is the author of five acclaimed books of poems, The Brink, Little Gods, The Havocs, Jackself and Material Properties, all published by Picador. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and both The Brink and The Havocs were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His collection Jackself won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize. He teaches at the University of Newcastle where he lives.

Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator from the north of England. Her debut collection, Citadel (Pavilion, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. Her new translation of the poems and prose of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross is forthcoming from Penguin Classics in 2026.

Please note that The Poetry Review is intended for an adult audience and the poems read may contain challenging language and/or imagery that some readers might find distressing.

This is a free online event.