Queer The Mic

Queer The Mic (Insta: @queerthemic) is a glittery spoken word and poetry stage for Brighton. An evening of joy, humour and resistance from entirely queer and trans performers. Expect 8 handpicked open mic performers, a brilliant feature chosen from the last event and a starry headline act. Our headliner Peter deGraft-Johnson is The Repeat Beat Poet, a London-based poet and emcee who fuses stream-of-consciousness writing and Hip Hop culture to capture and extend moments of time, thought, and feeling. Their debut pamphlet, A Testament To Life & Death, contains poems written for their utility, their intensity, and their tenderness of spirit. For Peter, these poems function as blessings, memorials, prophecies, and survivor’s guides for soldiering through modern life while being Black in Britain. A writer as comfortable in the cadence of preachers as easily as the flows of rappers, Peter engages his poetry to celebrate life, chronicle suffering, and point towards paths of survival and freedom. Our feature Simon Hauwaerts was born and raised in Belgium, but now lives in the UK. He is a poet who primarily writes for the page, but who has recently discovered that words can also be spoken, and that sometimes it is actually quite fun when they are. He can be found on Instagram at @simonhauwaerts