20.06.2026, 16:00
Queer Poetics of Trust (Artist Talk)
Billytown, The Hague
As part of the public programming for Vita Soul Wilmering's exhibition Mixed Feelings, I will hold an artist talk connecting the exhibition's themes with my own zineing and writing practice. I will explore the intimacy of zineing and queer archival poetry.
Titled Queer Poetics of Trust, the talk will focus on the intimate confessions in letters to the editor, contact ads and anonymous contributions. What are your responsibilities as an editor, but also as a writer working with archival materials; especially queer ones published in magazines that were only meant for certain eyes?
I will focus on the Leatherdyke Love Letters zine, a zine I edited with my zine publishing project DykeHouse Press. I will also be talking about my archival poetry project, [...] breathing [...], a pamphlet-in-progress that works with found materials from lesbian archives in Amsterdam, Glasgow and online. I will read from both projects and talk about their respective editing/writing processes.
25.05.2026
Pottenkijkers Film Club x DykeHouse Press present: Bloodsisters (1996)
On the 25th of May, Amsterdam's Pottenkijkers film club and DykeHouse Press took over Filmtheater de Uitkijk for a night dedicated to leather, kink and lesbians. I read from Leatherdyke Love Letters, the latest zine by my zine project DykeHouse Press, and watched Michelle Handelman's landmark documentary BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism (1995).
During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicentre of body modification and gender nonconformity. Transgender pioneers were fighting for visibility, and a bold S/M community was carving out space on its own terms. BloodSisters was the first film to represent this queer community on the fringes, featuring the players who started the current conversation on gender fluidity and radical sexuality. Shot on digital video from the inside of this scene, BloodSisters captures these queer outlaws in their zeitgeist moment with an unfiltered rawness that mirrors the activism of that era.
16.05.2026
Symposium Poetica
Ik vertelde over, en droeg voor uit mijn bundel-in-uitvoering, Teeth Marks, waar ik het afgelopen jaar tijdens de Poeticale Projectworkshop bij Perdu aan heb gewerkt.
Tijdens het Symposium Poetica vertelden Anne Ballon, Ida Blom, Barbara Colle, Eelco Couvreur, Marielle Matthee, Marieke Ornelis, Jochum Veenstra en ik over het project waar we de afgelopen tijd aan hebben gewerkt, en gingen met elkaar in gesprek over onze teksten. Dit alles vond plaats in het theater van Perdu in Amsterdam.
04.2026
April readings
I was part of two different poetry events in Scotland's Central Belt in April. On the 19th of April, I read at "Discount Guillotine Presents" alongside L Scully, Carle Gent, M. Elizabeth Scott and Meredith MacLeod Davidson at The House Arts Collective, Glasgow. On the 25th of April, I read at "Like Minds" at Typewronger Books in Edinburgh, with Jane Goldman, KD Sims, Meredith MacLeod Davidson and L Scully.
24.03.2026
Leatherdyke Love Letters launch at Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum, Amsterdam
I launched the Leatherdyke Love Letters zine, which I published with my zine project DykeHouse Press, at Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum on the 24th of March, 2026.
Leatherdyke Love Letters is an anthology zine of love letters by nine different contributors: love letters to dykes, to selves, to feeling, and to fantasy. To the poetic, the filthy, the intimate, weird and fun!
At the launch, we celebrated the publication of both the Leatherdyke Love Letters zine as well as the forth issue of Woman Wood, a smut gazette based in Berlin and run by Erin Honeycutt and a.Monti through CUTT Press. Joining forces for an afternoon of feminist queer smut at Athenaeum, we also had a conversation on DIY erotic zineing.
06.03.2026
Leatherdyke Love Letters launch at Category is Books, Glasgow
I launched the Leatherdyke Love Letters zine with DykeHouse Press at Category Is Books, Glasgow, on 6 March.
At the launch, we celebrated the publication of the zine with a few readings and a presentation on the history of leatherdyke print culture by the Glasgow Leatherdykes. I read my story 'Pulp,' published in Woman Wood #4.
06.12.2025
LETTERS OF NO Launch
I read poetry at the launch of "Letters of No" at San Serriffe. "Letters of No" is the latest publication from Sleepy Press, in which my poem 'Ache!' is published.
Letters of No gathers a series of visual and textual contributions that reclaim rejection. Printed as a series of letters in different genres and formats, the contributions in this issue take the epistolary form as a way of setting and collapsing boundaries between the self and the other. Rather than something received and felt in shame, these letters make rejection(s) public. By addressing the other, rejection is exposed as inherently relational.
19.09.2025
ELECTRIC BODIES at Amsterdam Bangs Festival
Luke Worthy and I read queer poetry at Amsterdam Bangs Festival, on 19 September at OT301, Amsterdam. Titled "Electric Bodies," the reading explored the queer electricity of the body in and of poetry. Queerness as energy, connection, transformation, monstrosity; queerness as the strange and uncanny, an exciting power, a celebration of the weird and delightful.
In my master's thesis, I conceptualised the body electric as a term that has grown from Walt Whitman's useage into a concept with which to explore queer bodies in poetry altogether, in their inbetweenness and nonconformity. Many of the poems I performed are the creative component to this academic work.
27.07.2025
AFK: Away From Keyboard, a SPAM reading series
On 27 July, I read some poems alongside Eloise Birtwhistle, M. Elizabeth Scott and Isaac Harris at AFK (Away From Keyboard), a poetry night curated by SPAM Press, at the Doublet in Glasgow. SPAM is a post-internet poetry magazine, podcast and press. In 2022 they published my debut pamphlet The Queen of Cups and Other Poems.
28.06.2025
Dichters in de Prinsentuin
In de Groningse Prinsentuin droeg ik tijdens het jaarlijkse literatuurfestival Dichters in de Prinsentuin mijn Nederlandse poezievertalingen voor, uit een selectie van gedichten van Porsha Olayiwola en jimmy cooper. Het vertalersprogramma werd verzorgd door de Vertaalslag van de Auteursbond.
13.06.2025
ARS POETICA at Perdu
I worked on some English translations of a selection of Maarten van der Graaff's poetry, from his newest collection "Huishoudboekje van de verborgen dingen" (2025), which were read at Perdu during the ARS POETICA programme on 13 June. During the Perdu programme, Juliana Spahr, Maarten van der Graaff, Pelumi Adejumo, Saskia de Jong and Caglar Koseoglu read their work. My translations of Maarten's work were projected onto the screen during his reading.
11.06.2025
Soapbox 6.0: On the Uses of Absence
My article poem "Please show me the way to the next ephemeral dyke bar (oh don't ask why, oh don't ask why) - On Queer Utopian Longing" was published in Soapbox 6.0.
With queer bars constantly appearing and disappearing, queerness often exists in ephemera more than it gets to exist in continuous, physical spaces. Yet, these physical spaces are essential to imagining a future for ourselves as a community, as places where we can be aware of the past and use it to imagine a better future through what Jose Esteban Munoz calls "queer utopian longing." Applying Munoz's writing on ephemera and queer utopias to Joelle Taylor's C+nto and Othered Poems, my piece takes a hybrid form between article and poem, analysing queer nostalgia and lamenting the loss of real and fictional queer spaces, all while continuing to look forward, into a queer future.
Soapbox can also be read online.
09.04.2025
SWEAT IT OUT: a poetry night
I read some of my work at SWEAT IT OUT, a queer poetry evening organised at Badhus Sauna in Amsterdam-Noord, where we alternated between going into the sauna and listening to poetry. Poems centred around catharis and letting go, in theme with the cleansing function of a sauna. A queer sauna event, the queer history of saunas and bathhouses was also considered at the reading.
08.04.2025
Butch/Battery/Electric: Into the Hole! on SPAM Plaza
My poem / essay in verse on the queer body electric, exploring the works of Whitman, Ginsberg and K. Patrick, is now up on SPAM Plaza! According to the editors: "In this latest post from our Digital Dreamland series, Parel Joy's poem offers the galvanising force of butch, charged with survival, transgression, queer time and literature's mediating fantasia."
31.01.2025
Dichtersmarathon 2025
I read alongside 29 other poets at Perdu's annual Dichtersmarathon or Poets' Marathon, where we each performed for 5 minutes. Every poet was asked to read the work of a non-Dutch colleague, so alongside two of my own poems, I also read 'butch' by the Scottish poet K. Patrick.