Poets Liberation Front: March Salon

lisa minerva luxx with Alaa Abd el-Fattah and Dr. Lola Olufemi; archiving the ungovernable

The Poet’s Liberation Front is a literary salon examining and repositioning the political function of the poet for current times.

For the March 2026 salon, the theme will be archiving the ungovernable: how we capture guerrilla organising work within our radical imagination, and what we do with archives of such to stimulate further action. There are myriad ways that historical social movements and political activists have bypassed censorship through creative means or outmanoeuvred ‘craft’ to mass circulate strategic thinking. From Diane di Prima’s collection Revolutionary Letters, based on her time organising within anarchist community-action groups, to Spanish communist poet Marcos Ana smuggling poems out of Franco’s prisons through the memory of other incarcerated men.

Poet, organiser and host of PLF, lisa minerva luxx, will be joined by Egyptian activist and public intellectual Alaa Abd el-Fattah and Black feminist theorist and writer, Lola Olufemi. They will each read work relating to the theme then lead an open discussion with attendees about the political now.

Poet’s Liberation Front encourages conversations between writers and organisers to better activate the role of authorship in times of uprising.

This event is created and hosted by lisa minerva luxx in partnership with Shubbak Festival and generously supported by Arts Council England.

The salon is a space to actively engage in current resistance literature emerging from our political landscape. Tickets are on a sliding scale solidarity rate, please pay honestly.

About the poets

lisa minerva luxx is a British Syrian writer and organiser. Author of Fetch Your Mother’s Heart (Out-Spoken, 2021), their poetry, essays and fiction have been published and broadcast internationally. Currently studying their PhD on militant poetics of the Arab diaspora. They have also published articles and essays on resistance methodologies in Al Jazeera, Electronic Intifada and PEN Transmissions. They are a platinum award-winning lyricist and have written three verse plays including what the dog said to the harvest which premiered at Southbank Centre.They were former organiser and spokesperson of direct action network Palestine Action until it was prohibited as a terrorist organisation in July 2025. They are a coordinator of the Filton24 Defence Committee.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah was one of Egypt’s most high-profile political prisoners since the 2011 revolution. An activist and public intellectual who was imprisoned for most of 12 years by the Egyptian government, during his incarceration, his campaign received global attention for his continued resistance, including hunger strikes. In 2021, Fitzcarraldo published a collection of his writing under the title You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. The book included essays, tweets, and personal reflections smuggled out of jails. He was named by Arundhati Roy, winner of the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize awarded by English PEN, as the "Writer of Courage". He was released on September 22nd 2025, and this will be his first speaking engagement in the UK since his liberation.

Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher from London. She is a lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths University and an Associate Lecturer in the Design School at University of the Arts London. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (Peninsula Press, 2026) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. She occasionally curates and is a member of the organising team at the Feminist Library based in Peckham.

Accessibility

The venue is wheelchair accessible.

The ticketing platform doesn't allow us to allocate free tickets; however, we are committed to ensuring that no one is turned away. If you can't afford the tickets, please reach out to us info@shubbak.co.uk and we will add your name at the door.