Jennifer Lee Tsai and Adam Lowe in Conversation with John McAuliffe

Join us for an evening to celebrate the debut collections of two exciting poets. 

We are delighted to welcome Jennifer Lee Tsai and Adam Lowe to the Centre for New Writing. 

Melete by Jennifer Lee Tsai is published by Bloodaxe Books. Patterflash by Adam Lowe is published by Peepal Tree Press. Both authors will be in conversation with John McAuliffe. 

Doors 6.30pm. Event starts 6.45pm. 

Tickets are free and both books will be available to buy at the event.

About the books: 

Jennifer Lee Tsai - Melete

Longlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2026

Jennifer Lee Tsai’s first full-length poetry book is a compelling narrative exploring family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss, migration and belonging from the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity. Melete interweaves dual cultures and heritages, moving from China and Hong Kong to Liverpool.

The mythic structure of the book relates to the three original Boeotian Muses – Melete, Mneme and Aoede. Named after the Muse of meditation and contemplation, Melete navigates the boundaries between life and art, personhood and subjectivity, states and places of spiritual transcendence.

This expansive book establishes a powerfully distinctive lyric voice in British poetry.

Adam Lowe - Patterflash

Patterflash embraces the performative, self-ironising aesthetic of campness but, as a mask, it is a complex and very malleable one, capable of showing features of tenderness, bravery, righteous anger and sometimes sadness and alarm – as well as the comedic. Within a collection that displays an engaging variety of language registers, both ‘high’ and ‘low’ in tone, the masking sometimes makes use of Polari, the gay street language that simultaneously reveals and conceals, excludes and invites, estranges and makes familiar. The collection connects the poet as a wry, humane observer of the scene, particularly as conducted in Manchester, and the persona of “Adam Lowe” as both actor in and narrator of his own dramas, who performs, exults and sometimes suffers in a wide range of guises and disguises.

What unites them is the urge to embrace the possibilities of being exactly who you want to be whatever the complications or consequences of your choice. From the four-year-old boy who, though always easy in his mixedness of race, also wants to wear a blonde woman’s wig without any angst of self-contradiction, through the poems delighting in the frank physicality of gay sex, to the mature man experiencing domestic contentment, Adam Lowe takes us on a journey rich in observation and always in a poetry that makes an art of patterflash.

About the authors: 

Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, writer and teacher. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. She is a fellow of The Complete Works, a Ledbury Poetry Critic and a former Contributing Editor to Ambit. Her poetry and literary criticism are widely featured in publications including The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Telegraph, The TLS & The White Review as well as on BBC Radio 4. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Kismet (ignitionpress, 2019) and La Mystérique (Guillemot Press, 2022). Jennifer has received a Northern Writers Award for Poetry and is a winner of the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poets’ Prize. She has worked extensively as a lecturer and teacher of English to students in universities and colleges as well as within community settings. Currently, she is an Artist in Residence at the Bluecoat and an AHRC Doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. Her first full-length poetry collection, Melete (Bloodaxe, 2026) was longlisted for the Jerwood Forward Prizes for Best First Collection 2026, selected as a Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer and described as ‘a landmark work’ in The Guardian.

Adam Lowe (he/his, mostly) is the UK's LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate and was Yorkshire's Olympic Poet for 2012. He is a writer, educator, publisher and performer from Leeds, though he currently lives and studies in Manchester.

Adam has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Central Lancashire, and has worked with The Poetry School and English PEN. He was named one of the '20 best writers under 40' in Leeds for the LS13 Awards and his chapbook Precocious was a reader nomination for the Guardian First Book Prize. He was a finalist for the Venture Poetry Awards, Eric Hoffer Award and Lambda Literary Awards, and was selected as one of 10 advanced poets for The Complete Works II programme. He is also an Obsidian alumnus.

Adam’s first full length poetry collection Patterflash (Peepal Tree Press, 2023) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2023. In her review for The Big Issue, Annie Hayter described Patterflash as “electric and winking”. Roy MacFarlane described it as “wicked and full of resistance” while Patience Agbabi said, “This unique debut demands a standing ovation.”

Adam is currently studying for a PhD in poetry at the University of Manchester, in collaboration with Commonword.