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Inner city life in Chicago's Bronzeville and the experiences of ordinary people inspired the first poetry collection published by Gwendolyn Brooks in 1945 and she followed this with a sequence of poems Annie Allen and a novella Maud Martha depicting Black women entering adulthood. Chicago based poet Peter Kahn, editor of an anthology of modern poets responding to the writing of Brooks, and poets Malika Booker and Keith Jarrett join Shahidha Bari to discuss the themes and textures in Gwendolyn Brooks' writing and what it means to write a Golden Shovel poem, whilst literature scholar Sarah Parker and pattern maker Gesa Werner talk about putting on an exhibition about fashion and poetry which features a poem by Brooks. Producer: Robyn ReadPoets in Vogue curated by Sophie Oliver, Sarah Parker and Gesa Werner runs Feb 17th to June 25th 2023. It includes a skirt that belonged to Sylvia Plath, a reconstruction of Anne Sexton’s red ‘reading dress’, creative interpretations of Audre Lorde’s, Edith Sitwell’s and Stevie Smith’s signature looks, a fabric-adaptation of a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and the clothes-performances of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Peter Kahn edited The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. His own poetry collection Little Kings is published by Nine Arches Press.In the Free Thinking archives you can find Noreen Masud on the aphorisms of Stevie Smith https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000srj1 A discussion Landmark: Audre Lorde hearing from her children, Jackie Kay and Selina Thompson https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004my0 and during February's Queer History month on BBC Sounds - a Words and Music episode celebrates Audre Lorde's writing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ql9k Sophie Oliver discusses Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000

The legend of Mélusine emerges in French literature of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in the texts of Jean d’Arras and Coudrette. A beautiful young woman, the progeny of the union between a king and a fairy, is condemned to spend every Saturday with her body below the waist transformed into the tail of serpent. She agrees to marry only on the condition that her husband should never seek to see her on that day every week. Shahidha Bari explores the emergence of the hybrid mermaid-woman, her historical significance and the legacy of the medieval myth of Mélusine.Olivia Colquitt is an AHRC funded doctoral candidate at the University of Liverpool whose research focuses upon the socio-cultural significance of the late Middle English translations of the French prose romance Mélusine and its verse counterpart, Le Roman de Parthenay.Hetta Howes is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at City, University of London and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. She is the author of Transformative Waters in Medieval Literature.Lydia Zeldenrust is an Associate Lecturer in Medieval Literature, where she currently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. She is the author of The Melusine Romance in Medieval Europe.The Royal Opera House is staging a version of Rusalka opening February 21st 2023. This folk-tale is a Slavic version of the water sprite figure seen in the Melusine story. This production will be broadcast as an episode of Opera on 3 on Radio 3 later in spring. Producer: Ruth Watts

Russell T Davies has written a 3 part mini-series - Nolly - about Crossroads star Noele Gordon. He joins Matthew Sweet along with screenwriter Paula Milne who wrote for Crossroads and Coronation Street and devised Angels for the BBC, and writer Gail Renard, who was working at ATV during the Crossroads years, to explore the unique and sometimes undervalued place of the soap opera in TV drama.Nolly will begin streaming on ITVX from Thursday 2nd February. The drama will be accompanied by a documentary entitled The Real Nolly which will also be available from the same date.Crossroads: The Noele Gordon Collection - a 96 DVD boxset - has just been released by Network.Producer: Torquil MacLeod