'coal': in conversation with author Remi Graves
Wed 4 Feb 2026, 5.30pm
Venue: John Harvard Library
Address: 211 Borough High Street, London, SE1 1JA
John Harvard Library is hosting a talk with poet and author Remi Graves, who will be talking about their latest poetry anthology, ‘coal’.
‘BLACKFRIARS BRIDGE, 1905. A Black Cherokee trans man is arrested and charged as a ‘wandering lunatic’. In the City of London asylum, he is photographed; looking directly at the camera, he insists and refuses. He dies in the asylum one year later. In the absence of Paul Downing’s own account, Remi Graves writes from and into the trans archive, presenting a sequence of poems and experiments mapping resonances between selves across historical records. Through river crossings and library passes, chance meetings and visitations, coal is a document that interrogates what we do with the scattered fragments of a life.’
