Day Mattar will be our Liverpool 2023 Regional Writer In Residence.
Day ran two workshops exclusively for GYRO, Liverpool’s LGTBQ+ youth support agency, which they had greatly benefited from as a young person.
Across the summer, Day will be in residence and facilitating workshops at FACT gallery–look out for them (wearing a yellow cape!) on Thursdays 22 & 29 June + 6, 13 & 20 July.
Day will also be part of the Turning Together summer workshops on 15 & 29 July–more details and booking here.
For the focus of their residency, Day said:
FACT is a space that focuses on showcasing the work of artists who embrace new technology and explore digital culture. I’m curious to see how these futuristic worlds nudge my own language forward–how might my poetry have to melt and broaden in order to properly touch the strange environment of virtual reality or alien planets? Can these immersive experiences help me imagine and temporarily live in a utopia that, with language, we could build a bridge toward?
Can there be a relationship between technology and lyric? How can the two learn from ivy and a brick wall, and live symbiotically? Where might the marriage between the two deliver us, on the boat of language, pushed by the winds of poetics.
We’re very grateful to GYRO and FACT for generously hosting Day and including them in their programmes.
About Day
Day Mattar is a queer poet and performer from Liverpool. They are the co-founder of Queer Bodies Poetry Collective, and facilitate poetry workshops with various art organisations, including the University of Liverpool, First Take, and Heart of Glass. Day has been the Poet in Residence at FACT, Writers&Scribez and EAT ME. Their poetry pamphlet, Springing from the Pews, was published by Broken Sleep Books.
Day’s poems come from the body, they use poetry as a tool to explore links between the psychological and the physical, the somatic and the sensual. Day has an MA (Distinction) in poetry from Manchester Metropolitan University and was a 2017 Creative Future Writers’ Award winner.
About the 2023 Writers In Residence
From 2016-2020, we supported five early career, underrepresented writers with unique residencies at Brighton’s Preston Park Recovery Centre. Due to the pandemic, we put the residency on hold for 2021 and 2022, but for this year we decided to bring the residency to the writers—allowing them to explore their hometowns, communities and unique places.
The residency is part of the 2023 Creative Future Writers’ Award programme. Day will also write a reflective blog and a new piece for the award anthology inspired by their residency. They’ll share this new work as part of the award showcase at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival in October.
This residency is made possible with the generous support of Arts Council England, Copyright Licensing Agency and Amazon Literary Partnership.
