Last year the Hi Zero Christmas Party was pretty fun. Let’s do it again! Lots of poetry. Books. Music from a thing, and also from people. Some dance. The usual time and place: the Hope & Ruin, from 7:30pm onwards. £4. Featuring the following poetical non-absences:

Tom Allen is currently a PhD student at the University of Sussex. Over the last two years he has published poetry and other things with Materials, Hi Zero, Mute Magazine, Steamer and Veer Press. He lives in South London and plans to publish more.

Tom Bamford is based in London and studies at the University of Sussex. His recent poetry has appeared via Datableed, Playhouse64, Sussex Guild of Poetry and Sleepy House Press and he blogs at byproductions.tumblr.com. His pamphlet Cryptozoology is out now from Veer.

Eleanor Careless is a PhD student writing on questions of gender and violence in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn at Sussex. Currently she is feeling surreal and helping to curate the ICA’s retrospective of filmmaker Luis Buñuel. She co-founded the feminist reading group contrapposto, and has poetry and essays published in a number of places including The Paper Nautilus, The Literateur, Hix Eros, The Guild, The Inkling and The Quietus.

Sammi Gale’s poems and short stories have featured in various places, including New Linear Perspectives, The Literateur, and Lighthouse. In his spare time, he edits a short fiction magazine called Exit.

Ben Graham is the author of A Gathering of Promises: The Battle for Texas’s Psychedelic Music, from the 13th Floor Elevators to the Black Angels and Beyond (Zero Books, 2015). He has also self-published two novels and this year contributed the essay ‘Blast and Bless, a selective history of British underground literature and DIY publishing,’ to the book Counterculture UK: A Celebration, published by Aurora Metro/Supernova. In addition to being an occasional author, cultural historian and wayward rock hack - most notably for the Quietus website - Ben has been writing and performing poetry for 20 years, regularly collecting his work into zine-style chapbooks.

Alan Hay is a Brighton based poet. He has read at X-ing The Line, Horseplay, Hi Zero and other nights. His poems have appeared in Summer Stock, Blart, Freaklung, Angel Exhaust and elsewhere. He is online at Archive Of The Now and All My Friends At Once.

In January 2015 Lisa Jayne resigned from Poetry. Following sightings of her using facilities belonging to the Poetry Department, her former colleagues called for her removal. It has since been decided, by mutual consent, for Lisa to be re-instated on the understanding she divides her time between the Departments of Poetry, Performance Art and the noise band Map 71.

Ed Luker: dolt syntactician, hippogryph lectern, flux breather, semblance brother, author of 'Peak Return’, ‘Headlost’, and the recently finished ‘Universal Attainment Centre’.

Luke Roberts’ books of poetry include 'False Flags,’ 'Left Helicon,’ 'Keep All Your Friends,’ and 'To My Contemporaries.’

Azad Sharma is an unpublished poet from South London. He studies Critical Theory at the University of Sussex. He is the co-founder and head editor of the Sussex Guild of Poetry.

Sam Solomon is co-director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence at U. of Sussex and co-translator from Yiddish of 'The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin.’

Daniel Spicer is a writer, broadcaster, improviser and poet based in Brighton, UK. He writes about music for The Wire and Jazzwise magazines. He presents a weekly radio show, The Mystery Lesson, on Brighton’s Radio Reverb 97.2FM, and contributes to BBC Radio 3’s Jazz On 3. He makes music with West Hill Blast Quartet, In Threads and Bolide. He has self-published two collections of poetry: Osshole Accidents (2012), and Notes For Colour (2015).

Verity Spott’s books have been published by Veer, Barque and Sad Presses, and whose poems have been translated into, or are being translated into, Greek, German, Spanish, Korean and Czech. She makes music with Binnsclagg, Four Manatees and In Threads, and makes guest appearances with the West Hill Blast Quartet, Hakarl and Xenoglossix Hypostases (a failed anarcho black metal band).

Timothy Thornton is a composer, pianist, and writer. He is interested in collaboration, signalling, and gesture. A theatre piece called PLANES, which he is making with Richard Dodwell, was previewed recently at Battersea Arts Centre. His sea-masque 'they heavily vanish’, for chamber ensemble, using text from The Tempest, sold out at Tete-a-Tete Contemporary Opera Festival in August. He is currently working on a score for dance together with Francesca Lisette.His recent books include 'Working Together For A Safer London’, from Barque Press, 'Water and Burning Effects On/Off’, from Shit Valley, and 'Broken Slat From Starling’, from The Winter Olympics (which he runs with Verity Spott). Mondays he rehearses with the violinist and violist Toby Hawks, Tuesdays he sings folk songs with friends, Thursdays he conducts and coaches the female-voice choir Women of Note. But his favourite night is bonfire night.

Dolly Turing may be a poet, party organiser, transformation instigator, collection of entities, dancer, experimental musician, process, git wizard, joke. Since reading at last year’s Hi Zero Xmas do she has read poems as part of Veer to Athens, at the Sussex Poetry Festival, at Supernormal Festival as part of the Archbishops of Banterbury and in various pub gardens. At the moment she musicks with Four Manatees and Thee Hairee Kuntz, creates parties, playtimes and worlds as part of 3EYE, explores and rambles with future Zen group Chapter Perilous and has a monthly allsorts music show BANG! on Totally Radio.

Noise and art and maths and computers and violin and poems and guitar and humour and beer and noise and drone and paint and weird apps and stuff yeah thats me / woop woop / i do poems here are poems there are poems everybody poems - it’s the time of the season - and sometimes conjunctive words and // the zero map / the emperors of ice cream / chemical bbrench / binnsclagg.