This evening will be hosted by lead tutor of the Wednesday Group Poetry Workshop, Milena Williamson.

The Wednesday Group, or a version of it, is a weekly poetry workshop which has been running at Queen's for decades, contributing to the writing community in Belfast by providing a space for rigorous and generous feedback. Readers this evening include Wednesday Group regulars Shakeema Edwards, Lesley Anne Evans and John James Reid, Milena Williamson, and special guest Philip Metres. 

Milena Williamson received her PhD from Queen's University Belfast and was the Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2023. Her debut collection Into the Night that Flies so Fast came out with Dedalus Press in 2024. 

Philip Metres is a professor of English at John Carroll University and the director of the University’s peace, justice, and human rights program. He is the author of many books, including most recently Fugitive/Refuge and coming this autumn, a new work of essays Dispatches from the Land of Erasure.

Shakeema Edwards is a graduate of the Seamus Heaney Centre, where she received an Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize, and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming this summer with Green Bottle Press.

Lesley-Anne Evans was born in Belfast and lives in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada. Her first collection Mute Swan was published by The St. Thomas Poetry Series. Lesley-Anne has poems appearing or forthcoming in Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review and Image Journal. She is currently studying for an MA in Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast.

John James Reid is a Belfast architect who has completed a MA at QUB. He has attended summer schools at the Seamus Heaney Centre and at the Yeats Centre Sligo. He has been published in magazines in Ireland, the USA, and England.