HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL
FROM THE DEPTHS
Running schedule · 1 to 5 October 2026
The Crypt Gallery, 165 Euston Road, London NW1 2BA
The crypt is open 10am to 6pm daily. Workshops and the open mic are separately ticketed. Featured poets open each open mic, two or three a night, before the floor goes to fourteen.
THURSDAY 1 OCTOBER
10am Crypt opens · residency begins · set-up and intentions
3pm Penance Poetry Workshop (3 to 5pm)
3pm The Sacred Space Within (3 to 5pm)
6pm Open mic in the crypt, featured: Kristal Sisodia · Valera Simonchuk · H
FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER
10am Crypt opens · residency · podcast recordings
11am Rediscovering Joy In A Crypt (11am to 1pm)
6pm Open mic in the crypt, featured: Byuka Makodru · Nols Nathankski · Luigi Coppola
SATURDAY 3 OCTOBER
10am Crypt opens · residency · live podcast recordings · Zine Day
1pm Trash Fire Poetry: Writing From The Ashes (1 to 3pm)
3pm Disasterpieces (3 to 5pm)
6pm THE GATHERING, upstairs in St Pancras New Church (6 to 9pm)
featured: Maddy Kilsby-McMurray · Emma Keun World premiere commission from Neil Bartlett OBE, with sixteen queer poets and four musicians. No open mic in the crypt tonight. Separate ticket.
SUNDAY 4 OCTOBER
10am Crypt opens · residency · podcast recordings
11am Protest Poetry: Defamiliarising Violence (11am to 1pm)
1pm Saying The Unsayable (1 to 3pm)
6pm Open mic in the crypt, featured: Maria Cohut · Pia Fajelagutan · Bee Wylie
MONDAY 5 OCTOBER
10am Crypt opens · closing day · podcast recording · zine assembly
3pm Penance Poetry Workshop (3 to 5pm)
5pm Stevie's Scary Stories Sharing Circle (5 to 7pm)
6pm Closing open mic in the crypt, featured: Stevie Grant · Alice Border · Tom Bland Zine launch and distribution at the closing.
THE RESIDENT POETS
Pia Fajelagutan (she/her)
Better known in certain corners of the local poetry scene as Liethers, or The Piss I Call Art, Pia is an Abu Dhabi-raised poet, writer, and illustrator whose work examines the intersections of identity, migration, memory, and myth. She crafts poetry that traverses landscapes both intimate and expansive, exploring what it means to belong, to leave, and to continually reinvent oneself. Pia has cultivated a multidisciplinary artistic practice spanning poetry, prose, and illustration. Her creative work is marked by lyrical honesty, emotional precision, and a fascination with the stories that emerge from cultural crossings and personal transformation.
She is the author of Whiskey for the Uninitiated, a genre-blurring debut collection that brings together verse, narrative fragments, and original artwork. Through her writing,
Emma Keun (she/her)
Emma Keun lives in London. She is published in Kite String II, III and IV, anthologies for the open mic and poetry community, and in Word Space. She has four honourable mentions from Dark Poets Club and one highly commended from Creative Writing Ink. When not performing or writing she attempts building, sculpting or growing things.
Luigi Coppola (he/him)
Poetry, music, rum and coke. Luigi has featured at Glastonbury Festival, Tate Modern, Greenwich Theatre, Koestler Arts, the Cutty Sark and the Southbank Centre's New Poets Collective. He is a Poetry Archive Worldview winner, Bridport shortlisted, Ledbury and National longlisted, and Lost Souls and Farrago Slam Champion. He makes music as The Only Emperor, and his debut comes from Broken Sleep Books. linktr.ee/PoetryPreacher
Dr Maria Cohut (she/they)
Maria is a Romanian writer living in Brighton with her ever-growing family of Giant African Land Snails, Madagascan hissing cockroaches and stick insects. Her writing is haunted by questions of identity, belonging, displacement, and what makes us human. It appears in many online and print publications, including the Borders & Belonging anthology (Cephalopress, 2022), The Hyacinth Review, The Hellebore, and The Other Side of Hope: Journeys in Refugee and Immigrant Literature, and has aired on radio. Her first chapbook, Spatter Pattern (back room poetry, 2023), explored gender-based violence by reimagining detective fiction tropes. Multiple Exposures (Flight of the Dragonfly, 2026) is her first full-length collection, reflecting on becoming uprooted, writing in an adopted language, and healing fractured identities.
Maddy Kilsby-McMurray (they/them)
Maddy is a non-binary poet and writer involved with a number of local creative and LGBTQIA+ groups. They are a neurodiversity advocate and regularly host talks sharing their lived experience as an ADHD-er. They volunteer with BCS, working to improve the tech industry as a whole.
Bee Wylie (she/her/bee)
Bee is a weird little witchy word smith from the West Midlands. She has been writing poetry since around 2016 and performing spoken word on the London scene since 2021, and is a regular at the Word Zoo. She is currently illustrating her debut book, Dream Weaving, due to be published through Hay House: a collection of her earlier work, focused on spirituality, reincarnation, grief, the raw nature of love, and finding light in dark places. She is heavily influenced by her late mother Louise Wylie, a renowned psychic medium and spiritual teacher who taught Writing with Spirit at The College of Psychic Studies.
Tom Bland (he/him)
Tom's first collection and verse novel, Camp Fear, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2021 and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize in 2022. The book fuses poetry with satire, surrealism and psychoanalysis, calling on Freud, Artaud and Acker, 4chan and Lana Del Rey, and inviting the reader into the dark corners of the human psyche.
Stevie Grant (he/him)
Queer Hackney poet, working in the long queer tradition of gothic writing. He closes the festival with a sharing circle for stories that frighten, held in candlelight in the crypt. @steviepoems
Kristal Sisodia (they/them)
Actor and poet. Kristal weaves voice, rhythm and sound together to guide people into a deeper relationship with their words, bodies and stories, working with singing, live instruments, loop station and meditation. Their practice treats poetry as ritual and the body as a place to listen.
Alice Border (she/her)
Slam-winning performance poet in London and part of the Make Poetry Weird Again collective. She has headlined everywhere from Somerset House to the Divine Fringe, and her work has been published by WriteLondon, Crunch and Edition. Key pieces include The Unsolicited Shit Pic and An Ode To Billingsgate Fish Market. Her debut pamphlet, Taste Me, is published in October. @alicesayingstuffSlam-winning performance poet in London and part of the Make Poetry Weird Again collective. She has headlined everywhere from Somerset House to the Divine Fringe, and her work has been published by WriteLondon, Crunch and Edition. Key pieces include The Unsolicited Shit Pic and An Ode To Billingsgate Fish Market. Her debut pamphlet, Taste Me, is published in October. @alicesayingstuff
H (she/her)
After years of only writing therapeutically, H mysteriously started writing and performing poetry in early 2025. She revels in surreal social satire, weaving humour and sadness, language experiments and characters. She likes to express her tranquilised emotions, and the things she really wishes she had said at the time, to willing audiences. She has been published in three anthologies: Surrey Poet Laureate, Lost Souls, and Forge Press' An Anthology Against Hate. She goes by H because she does not really like her name. Yes, she has a poem about it. @haitch_speaks
Byuka Makodru (they/them)
Byuka is a trans, disabled and migrant writer working across speculative fiction, experimental writing and poetry. Their practice spans immersive performance, ritual facilitation, visual art and publishing, tracing wordscapes through cross-medium world-building rooted in social justice, displacement, ancestrality, anti-colonialism, ecology and queerness.
Their poetry performance work has been shared at Ugly Duck, House of Annetta, the Crypt Gallery, QUEERCIRCLE, Ubiskes3 in Lithuania and the Fringe Festival in Poland. In 2025 they facilitated workshops on poetry as spellcasting and created a deck of poetry oracles for the Burned House Horizon exhibition at Mimosa House, London. Their current practice explores psychogeography, deep listening, ritual and writing with ash, using the material as a portal between the living and the dead, and a channel to the lineages of witches, women and marginalised people burned at the stake. They connect to poetry as a tool for liberation and futuring.
HEADLINE COMMISSION
Neil Bartlett OBE
Poet, novelist, theatre director and translator, and one of the defining figures of British queer culture. His work across four decades has consistently interrogated the relationship between queer history, form, and the body politic. He gives the world premiere of a new commission in St Pancras New Church on Saturday 3 October.