Sascha Akhtar’s Embodied Performance Praxis Seminar 2026/27
Intimate monthly seminars with Sascha Akhtar on Zoom, diving into her specialist area of Decolonial, embodied performance Praxis.
* This Seminar will take place on the video-conferencing platform, ZOOM *
Monthly seminar groups with Sascha Akhtar, featuring close reading, in-depth discussion, and feedback on your poems-in-progress, as well guidance on your next steps as a poet, conversation around contemporary poetry, and focused work on embodied performance praxis.
Being a contemporary poet has come to mean an implicit understanding that we must read our work out/perform it or present it in some fashion to an audience, often in real time. In this seminar we will consider this aspect as an art in itself. We will look at what it is to fashion one’s craft within the framework of Decolonial praxis, with embodiment and presence. This seminar will be a space to also receive support for one’s existing practice. We will also look at how to add layers such as sound, image and props.
With a maximum of eight students in each group, these seminars provide an intimate setting and generate supportive and critical friendships, helping you to become part of a poetry community.
Entry into this group is by application only. If you would like to sign up, please email [email protected] for information and we will assist you in the application process.
Do not book online before applying.
8 x monthly sessions between October and May. Classes will run on Saturdays 11am–1:30pm on Zoom and take place on the following dates.
10-Oct
14-Nov
12-Dec
9-Jan
13-Feb
13-Mar
10-Apr
8-May
More information about how all our seminars work can be found on the Seminars Course Page.
Image credit: @paul-blenkhorn-sensoryarthouse
About Sascha Akhtar 
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Sascha A. (Aurora) Akhtar is committed to decolonial praxis in art and education. Akhtar writes short fictions, poetry, essays, and is a translator. She was a Creative Writing lecturer for six years at the University of Greenwich until 2025, when a cull of lecturers took place.
Akhtar has authored seven metaphysical poetry collections. The first, The Grimoire of Grimalkin (Salt, 2007), was released in a second edition by Prototype Publishers in 2024 and is currently available. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, translated, and performed internationally at festivals such as the Ledbury Poetry Festival, Medway Festival of Literature, Emirates Festival of Literature, Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, Avantgarde Festival Hamburg, and Southbank Centre’s MELTDOWN festival London curated by Yoko Ono.
She has been a judge for the Streetcake Prize for Experimental Writing and the Stephen Spender Prize. In 2019, Poetry Wales named ‘Poems For Eliot’ as the number one poem of the last five years and Only Dying Sparkles was featured on the Southbank Poetry Library acquisitions & at the University of Leeds Poetry By Design Exhibit in the same year.
A prose collection set in the country of her birth, Pakistan, The collection Of Necessity And Wanting, is a study of the economics of want and the politics of need in a post-colonial environment. It was shortlisted for the UBL prize for literary excellence. Akhtar’s translations of pioneering feminist writer Hijab Imtiaz “Belles-Lettres” are available on Oxford University Press. Akhtar’s latest writings whether cross-genre creative non-fiction, fiction, or poetry appear in Ludd Gang, BlackBox Manifold, Shuddhasar, Fugitives & Futurists, Deleuzine, Lucy Writer’s Platform, Storgy, The Learned Pig, Tears In The Fence, BlazeVox, Anti-Heroin Chic, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, the Prototype Annual 4, Cut-Purse (Tangerine Press, 2022), Of Myths and Mothers anthology 2022, and The Fortnightly Review. In 2019, her poems appeared in the Blackpool Illuminations and her most recent essay ‘Decolonizing the Ghazal’ was published in the Magma ‘Ownership’ issue.
IG: @sascha.akhtar
Facebook: @choisirlemotjuste
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