Guest poets + Open-Mic
7th December
This month, we’re thrilled to have two sensational guest poets with us! Stav Poleg and Leo Boix will be reading from their most recent collections and sharing insights into their work. As always, there will be open-mic slots on the evening so bring along that poem you didn’t get to read last month! We can’t wait to see you all and hear your writing. Entry this month will be £5 on the door (we can take cash and card). We hope to see you there at 18:30 on the 7th December at the Town & Gown for a sensational evening of poetry and the final CB1 of 2025!
Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet, born in Argentina and based in London. His second collection, Southernmost: Sonnets (Chatto & Windus, 2025), was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and praised by The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Morning Star for its lyrical power and fearless engagement with queer, diasporic experience. Boix’s debut English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and named one of The Guardian’s top five poetry books of the year. Boix is the editor and lead translator of the groundbreaking Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Poetry (Fourteen Publishing), and has introduced English-speaking audiences to major Latin American voices including Diana Bellessi, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, and José Watanabe. His poems appear in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, World Literature Today, Modern Poetry in Translation and in anthologies such as 100 Queer Poems (Vintage) and The Forward Book of Poetry. A fellow of The Complete Works program, he co-directs Un Nuevo Sol, nurturing Latinx writers in the UK. His work has been commissioned by Tate Modern, Kew Gardens, Projekt Europa and the National Poetry Library, earning prizes including the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize, the Keats-Shelley Prize, and a PEN Award.
Stav Poleg is a writer, poetry editor, and creative writing tutor based in Cambridge, UK. Her debut poetry collection, The City (Carcanet, 2022) was chosen for the Financial Times’ Best Summer Books 2022, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for First Collection, 2023. Her second poetry collection, The Banquet (Carcanet, 2025) is currently shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025. Poleg’s poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, in The New Yorker, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review and elsewhere. Her work has been published in leading anthologies, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker (Knopf, 2025), The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber, 2024 ) and New Poetries VIII (Carcanet, 2021). Her graphic-novel installation, ‘Dear Penelope: Variations on an August Morning’, created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Her theatre work was read at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and the Shunt Vaults, London, and most recently at Kettle’s Yard gallery, Cambridge. She serves on the editorial board of Magma Poetry magazine and teaches for the Poetry School on a range of subjects including poetry inspired by the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey and the cinema of Fellini.
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