Poetry Campus

Host: Geoffrey van der Ven 
Guests: Daniël Olivier, William Makin en Sander Labruyère 

During this festival edition, we visualize many different connections that exist between poetry and other disciplines, subjects, other spheres. This program, Poetry Campus, showcases different students who are involved with poetry in fun, creative and inspiring ways. Several students will share their own poetry and the projects that they’re working on to help increase the love of poetry at their school or university. 

William Makin 
William Makin is 21 years old, born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, and he is the current the Campus Poet of Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Poetry was an art practice that came to him near the beginning of his adult life, as a way to capture and document the 'going on's' of his life. He uses poetry as a hallmark for where he is at a given point in time and to archive the spirits of who he once was. He believes in the brutally simple and beautiful creativity of poetry, and the meditative nature of blending ink on page to turn thoughts into paintings as words paint pictures. 

Daniel Olivier
Daniël Olivier writes fairy tales, historical fiction, and poetry for children and adults. His work has appeared in the Revisor and Minutes of the Invisible. He graduated from art school with a research project on gender diversity in antiquity, and his graduation collection ‘On the banks of three rivers lies a dog’ was nominated for the 2023 graduation prize. He wonders what it means to write stories for children during the sixth ecological mass extinction. 

Sander Labruyère
Sander Labruyère is 28 years old and studied film- and literary sciences in Leiden. His love for the English language and poetry flourished when he came into contact with a poetry group named Pull-up Poetry, which he is now an organizer for. He is also part of Sleutelwoord in Leiden. In 2021, he won the Maktub Poetry Competition and has been performing regularly since. Labruyere's poems have an intimate and very visual feel to them. At the moment he is working on his first poetry collection!