Three Poets at Lighthouse: Launching Jennifer Lee Tsai's Melete and Jay Gao's The Dead One... with Agata Maslowska

The poets:

Jennifer Lee Tsai is an award-winning poet, writer and teacher. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. She is a fellow of The Complete Works, a Ledbury Poetry Critic and a former Contributing Editor to Ambit.

Her poetry and literary criticism are widely featured in publications including The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Telegraph, The TLS & The White Review as well as on BBC Radio 4. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Kismet (ignitionpress, 2019) and La Mystérique (Guillemot Press, 2022).

Jennifer has received a Northern Writers Award for Poetry and is a winner of the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poets’ Prize. She has worked extensively as a lecturer and teacher of English to students in universities and colleges as well as within community settings. She is an AHRC Doctoral student in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool and an Artist in Residence at the Bluecoat. Her first full-length poetry collection, Melete (Bloodaxe, 2026) was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer and described as ‘a landmark work’ in The Guardian.

Jay Gao is a poet and writer from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is forthcoming in Fall 2026 from Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. His debut collection Imperium (2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English at Columbia University.​​

Agata Maslowska is a writer, poet, and translator. She was born in Poland and lives in Scotland. Her debut poetry collection “Woman : Plant : Language” was published by Bad Betty Press in September 2025 and was named the Book of the Month for January 2026 in Poetry Extra, BBC Radio 4. She is the recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award, the Hawthornden Writing Fellowship, and the Gillian Purvis Award for New Writing.