Poetry at Bonington Gallery: Fran Lock & Jac Common
Bonington Gallery is delighted to host poets Fran Lock and Jac Common for a relaxed session of readings, with complimentary coffee and refreshments provided.
Fran Lock is known for work that combines political urgency, formal innovation and fierce lyrical energy. Joining her is Nottingham-based poet Jac Common, whose writing explores queer ecologies, nonhuman worlds, collective life and alternative futures.
This event takes place towards the culmination of two exhibitions: Common Grounds – Counterculture & Confrontation Since 1976 by Alan Lodge in the gallery, and It’s A Wonderful Protest by The Velvet Acronyms in the Foyer.
About Fran Lock
Dr Fran Lock is a poet, essayist, editor, amateur medievalist, and rescue-dog parent. She is the author of numerous chapbooks and sixteen poetry collections, most notably Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024. Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University 2022-2023, and is a Commissioning Editor at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters. She is a newly-minted core tutor on the MA at Poetry School in London. She lives between Cambridge and Kent.
About Jac Common
Jac Common is a noisy writer and derelict gardener from Nottingham. Their work has been published in places like SPAM, Permeable Barrier, Tentacular, fourteen poems, and The Journal of Evolutionary Biology. As part of the Coneffluents collective with K Lewis Hood, they attend to queer, anti-colonial and nonhuman life ways in wet-land ecologies and infrastructures. Work from this has been published in Futch Journal, exhibited as a microbial installation at the Glasgow International Arts fair, and intentionally dropped into the Channelsea River. Jac’s first pamphlet of poetry, Wetbulb, was published in 2024 by Osmosis Press; and their most recent pamphlet, EARTHLIGHTS, was published by Datableed in 2026.