Tues 22nd April
6.30-9pm
In honour of her third poetry collection, ON A DATE WITH DISAPPOINTMENT (Button Poetry, 2025), Najya Williams is hosting The Date Night Tour, featuring friends, family and poetry rockstars for evenings of fun, reflection and poetry. She is excited to visit Burley Fisher Books and feature the UK's finest: Taylor Beidler, Francis-Xavier Mukiibi, and Jess Murrain. You can learn more about Najya and her illustrious features below:
Najya A. Williams (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist who floats along the U.S. East Coast. She graduated from Harvard College, and is a 2025 M.D. and Narrative Medicine Program Graduate from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine (Temple University). Outside of her two prior collections, Cotton (The BGM Press, 2017) and The Missing Entries (The BGM Press, 2023), Najya's poetry, essays, and other writings have been accepted and/or published by a number of organizations, including POETRY Magazine, Black Youth Project and Healing Points.
A byproduct of the American Midwest, Taylor Beidler is a London-based playwright, prose, and performance artist. Taylor was the inaugural recipient of the UEA New Forms Award through the National Centre for Writing. They provided written material for AMC, and were recently commissioned to co-write an original pilot for Silverprint Pictures/ITV2. They worked with the UN High Level Champions Team to present a poem to launch the 2020 Race to Zero November Youth Dialogues. Through the Napkin Poetry Review, their poetry was featured as one of 200 Visionaries for Louis Vuitton’s 200th Anniversary, featured on storefronts worldwide. Their collaborative poetry with composer Aliayta Foon-Dancoes was a part of Plastic Language x Tenement Press, available to listen on NTS Radio. They are currently a part of Barbican Young Poets and are finishing their first novel.
Francis-Xavier Mukiibi is a poet and performer of Ugandan heritage from North London. He is an alumnus of the Barbican Young Poets programme, the Roundhouse Poetry Collective and the Obsidian Foundation retreat. He was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for his forthcoming debut pamphlet, Mutabani & [ ]ther Poems (Little Betty, 2025), and won Silver in the Creative Future Writers’ Award for 2024. He produced one of 40 short poetry films as part of the Apples and Snakes Future Voices programme. His poems appear in Under the Radar, Propel Magazine, Magma and Poetry London among others.
Jess Murrain (she/they) is an actor, poet, filmmaker, and live artist. She is also co-founder of Theatre with Legs, a queer, experimental performance company, whose latest work Neuroqueer is in development with the support of Castles in the Sky, Marlborough Arts and Bradford 2025 City of Culture. Jess is alumnus of Southbank New Poets Collective (21/22), winner of Out-Spoken Poetry Prize and Ledbury Poetry Prize. Jess’s debut poetry pamphlet One Woman-Horse Show is published by Bad Betty Press and her poetry, essays and conversation have also appeared in bath magg, Callaloo, Magma, The Poetry Review, Tentacular, Under the Radar, PERVERSE and Field Notes on Survival: A Bad Betty Anthology.