SNOW & THIS KNOT: Jason Allen-Paisant & Kimberly Campanello

Join us for an evening of new, unpublished poetry in performance.

Jason will read and perform from his book-length poem SNOW. To move through snow as a literal and metaphysical medium is to voyage through scenes of unnameable beauty and unnameable violence. Here, snow is archive, weapon, spell. The work asks how violence learns to speak beautifully, how repetition becomes enchantment, and how falling becomes a way of remaining, inside pressure.

Kimberly will perform from Beginning Imperfectly Wanting, the first book of THIS KNOT, her new version of Dante's Divine Comedy. Kimberly has 'descended into detail' to create a new version of Dante’s radical medieval text in which he famously journeys through an imagined afterlife from Hell to Purgatory to Paradise, taking on ethics, aesthetics, politics, and the human relationship with nature and the cosmos. Her version traces the knotted threads of her personal background in Volturara Appula (Puglia, Italy) and Elkhart, Indiana (lands of the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe), and her experience of young onset Parkinson's disease.

About the poets:

Jason Allen-Paisant (FRSL) is an award-winning poet and writer whose works explore intimacy, memory, and the aesthetics of transformation. His poetry and prose attend to how history, perception, and the body shape one another. He earned a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from Oxford University, after working on theatre from the English- and French-speaking Caribbean. His sophomore poetry collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, won both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T.S. Eliot Prize for 2023. His other books include Engagements with Aimé Césaire, a work of philosophy that asks what it means to be human after the collapse of colonial humanism. Allen-Paisant is Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, and currently a Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.

Kimberly Campanello is the author of the poetry-object and durational performance MOTHERBABYHOME. Her latest poetry collection An Interesting Detail was released in 2025, as was her debut novel Use the Words You Have. Her abiding preoccupation is with the power of language to ‘change states’ – transforming the law and the State, our emotional-physical-spiritual-intellectual states, and its own state as each word shifts and morphs with every use and encounter. Campanello's  awards include a Markievicz Award from Ireland's Arts Council & the Department of Culture, Heritage, and an Arts Council Ireland Project Award with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media for a digital poetry project that converses with Calvino’s Invisible Cities. She is Professor of Poetry and Director of Poetry@Leeds at the University of Leeds. Campanello is currently creating a new version of Dante's Commedia, which has been supported by the William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame.