The next Mirrorball Showcase is on Thursday 14th May at 7pm with headline poet Isabelle Baafi reading alongside Helena Fornells Nadal, Elizabeth Rimmer, Charlie Gracie, Donal McLauchlin, and Mairi Murphy. The event will be held in Waterstones, Sauchiehall Street please arrive before 7pm to ensure access. The venue is wheelchair accessible.

There will be a Zoom live stream option for members who can’t make it along in person – thanks to our tech support Mark Cunningham.

Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.

Helena Fornells Nadal is a Catalan poet based in Edinburgh. She is currently engaged in creative research on the intersection between land politics and ecopoetics. Her first pamphlet, I Could Not Ask You To, was published by Mouse Press in 2025 and was selected as PBS Winter Pamphlet Choice. 

Elizabeth Rimmer is a poet, editor, blogger and occasional translator. She was born and educated in Liverpool in 1954, and moved to Scotland in 1977. She published her first full collection of poetry Wherever We Live Now with Red Squirrel Press in 2011, and her new book Comrades of Dark Night is her fifth and will be launched in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the founding of Red Squirrel Press._

Her work has been translated into Gaelic, French and Arabic, and installed on the Poetry Path at Corbenic. One of her poems featured in an installation at Inverewe, and was briefly displayed on the side of a bus in Edinburgh.

Her work is influenced by her medieval studies, and includes translations from Latin, Old English and Old Norse. She is interested in herbs, Permaculture, Geopoetics, folklore and folk music, and in the Christian mystical and contemplative traditions. She is actively concerned in, and sometimes writes about, refugee issues and migration, violence against women, global disarmament and environmental issues.

A rabble of glints – Charlie Gracie Donal McLaughlin, Mairi Murphy

Charlie Gracie‘s poetry collections, Good Morning (2010) and Tales from the Dartry Mountains (2020), were published by Diehard Press. His novel, To Live With What You Are (2019), was published by Postbox Press, and his collection of poetry and prose, Belfast to Baillieston (2023), by Red Squirrel Press. 

Donal McLaughlin has published two short story collections: an allergic reaction to national anthems & other stories (2009) and beheading the virgin mary, and other stories (2014). He started publishing haiku during the Covid lockdown.  

Mairi Murphy‘s poems have appeared  various  magazines. In 2018, Clochoderick Press published her first collection, Observance. She is currently working on a second, for Seahorse Publications.