Romany Poet Jo Clement featured in prestigious poetry short film series
A poem by a Romany poet has been featured in a series of short films published in the prestigious online poetry magazine WritersMosaic.
Jo Clement was filmed reading her Playing Cards in the idyllic Cumbrian landscape, home to Appleby Horse Fair.
Playing cards, directed by Savannah Acquah, speaks to Clement's own British-Gypsy heritage and conjures in powerful imagery the long persecution and discrimination endured by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people.
The full version of Playing Cards can be seen on the WritersMosaic website here: Playing Cards | WritersMosaic Magazine
Playing Cards is one of eight poems from four poets that was filmed by and published by the WritersMosaic working with the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation and was intended to expand the reach of the four award-winning, global majority poets through the visual culture of film.
The full series of eight poems can be seen on the WritersMosaic website here: Poetry Films | WritersMosaic Magazine
WritersMosaic Founding Editor Gabriel Gbadamosi says: “The approach to curating these poets and filmmakers is an extension of WritersMosaic's mission to highlight and support the work of global majority writers who constitute a new literary mainstream in the UK – international in outlook and richly diverse in their literary input to our developing culture and society. The four poets reflect this (at times, breathtaking) range: Jason Allen-Paisant (Jamaica), Marjorie Lotfi (Iran and the United States), Jo Clement (Romany-Traveller) and Anthony Anaxagorou (Cyprus), all of whom are now British writers.”
The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation Executive Director, Amy Holmes says: “We are proud to produce this series in partnership with WritersMosaic, and to add a new dimension to the work of these outstanding poets through film. Through this collaboration, we invite new audiences to experience the creativity of today’s British poets and filmmakers.”
Jo Clement is a poet and interdisciplinary maker of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller ethnicity based in the North-East. Her first poetry collection, Outlandish (2019), was shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. Since 2018, she has led Butcher’s Dog as its Managing Editor. In 2022 and 2023 the press was voted as producing the UK's 'Best Poetry Magazine' (Saboteur Awards). From 2022-2024 Clement selected Poetry Book Society collections and wrote reviews for the PBS Bulletin. Her BBC Radio appearances include Northern Drift, Poetry Please and Start the Week, and her work has been featured in London Poem’s on the Underground. Clement is a Northern Writers' Award winner. Clement has a doctorate, and lectures in Creative Writing at Northumbria University.
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