Join us for the next Curated Conversations, a Masterworks Lecture Series, with exhibiting artist and lecturer Yesha Townsend. Townsend is a published writer and poet and a professor at The Bermuda College. She is currently featured in the Mezzanine Gallery as part of the NOT ALL HAS TO BE AS IT WAS exhibition at Masterworks. She will dive deeper into her work as a visual artist, with an emphasis on form – which has been a major theme in her artwork as a poet adventuring into a visual space.
Date: Thursday, October 24 from 5:30 – 7pm.
Entry: free for members | $10 for non-members.
Artist Bio
Yesha Townsend is a Bermudian writer. She holds a B.M. in Music Composition and an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She is an English lecturer at The Bermuda College.
Her work has been published or featured in The Bermudian Magazine, BerMemes, Button Poetry, The Bermuda Anthology of Memoir & Creative Non-Fiction, Poui: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, The Wolverhampton Literary Festival 2021, MOKO: caribbean arts and letters, and The Bermuda Biennial 2022.
She has performed as a rapper & poet; notably at TEDxBermuda 2015, Taylor Rankin’s LeroyFest 2015 & 2016, and The Bermuda Festival of the Performing Arts 2018, 2021 & 2023. She has represented the island of Bermuda internationally as a writer at The Women of the World Poetry Slam 2016 in Brooklyn, NY, The Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta) 2017 in Barbados, The Commonwealth Short Story Prize Workshop 2019 in Barbados, The Rock Retreat Residency 2022 in Gibraltar, The Accord Literary Residency 2023 in Accra, The British Virgin Islands Literary Festival 2023, The PREE Writing Studio 2024 in Kingston, Jamaica, The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival 2024, and was the keynote speaker for The Oxford English Dictionary World Englishes Symposium 2022 and the Bermuda Human Rights Commission Conference 2024.
As a visual artist, she has shown at the 2022 Bermuda Biennial, and in a collaborative capacity in Gherdai Hassell’s NOT ALL HAS TO BE AS IT WAS exhibition at Masterworks Bermuda 2024.
She was awarded the Eva Naomi Hodgson Racial Justice Award 2023, for her essay and Bermuda Biennial entry ‘Cartographies of Loss,’ in collaboration with writer Kristin White.
Her writing explores grief, identity and love through the lens of the Black Bermudian and Caribbean experience, she writes of home, of hurricanes, of Bermudian history, mythology, and folklore.