StAnza X EMT: 2023 Poets in Residence

In partnership with the Edwin Morgan Trust, StAnza – Scotland’s International Poetry Festival – held an open-call for poets-in-residence for the 2023 festival.  Two positions were available: 1) The Open Award – open to poets who are Scottish by birth or current residence; 2) The Translation Award – open to poets writing in a language other than English. The aim of the residencies is to support and promote marginalised voices in poetry.

The poets selected for the residencies were JJ Fadaka and Gabriela Milkova. They created a body of work that responded to the 2023 festival theme – WILD: forms of resistance – with consideration of Edwin Morgan’s legacy, which they presented at a special Poetry Cafe event at StAnza on 12 March 2023.

Gabriela and JJ at StAnza 2022
JJ on stage at the Poetry Cafe event
Gabriela on stage at the Poetry Cafe event

Read our Q & A with JJ and our Q & A with Gabriela to learn more about their creative processes. StAnza also caught up with JJ and Gabriela in April 2023, which you can read about here.

About the StAnza Poets in Residence

Jj Fadaka is a writer, workshop facilitator and radical based in Edinburgh. Her writing explores the possibility that community, feminism, and love give us to create change. Her workshops draw on feminist and black radical traditions to create space for exploring our desires in a world without barriers. As a member of the Community Wellbeing Collective, she facilitates weekly creative writing workshops in Wester Hailes, Edinburgh. Jj uses poetry and art to speak to the political urgencies facing her local and global community whilst centring community and joy-making in mapping the struggles against these.

Gabriela Michele Milkova is a Macedonian poet based in St Andrews, Scotland. Her first collection, Врвот на ноќта/The Peak of Tonight, was published as a bilingual publication in Macedonia, 2016. Her work is textual, audial, and visual, and her most recent audial collection, Do You Know the Sea?, debuted on UK Radio, Supernova in 2020. She writes in English and Macedonian, and has had work published, aired, and performed across platforms in both languages.