Writers Salon | Misread with Elia Isaac

A writing workshop for anyone who's ever had to work harder to be understood.

Come and join Connect through Creativity's CRIPtic x London Writers Centre with Elia Isaac and sign up for the Salon open mic if you'd like to share your work.

Whether you are new to writing or are a seasoned and published poet, gain inspiration and start a new ongoing adventure in creativity.

Read your work at the sharing spot

There are five sharing spot slots available at the Salon and if you'd like to share your work please complete the following form by 11am on Friday 8th May 2026: https://forms.gle/beJVnHRoYtVKH8p58

You'll be asked to provide your contact details and a short bio and the reading you will be doing which should be no longer than 5 minutes. This is so we can send the work to our BSL interpreters in advance of the session. You can submit these in written English, video or audio file format.

About the workshop

You know the feeling. You try to say something, and it doesn't land. The word doesn’t arrive in time. Someone fills your silence for you. You’re read as someone you’re not, and the version of you that reaches other people isn’t quite the one you sent.

Misread begins in that gap, between what was meant and what was received, and asks: What lives there? What gets lost? What gets added? And what has that extra labour to be understood taught us about language?

This workshop holds both the wound of being misunderstood and the creative possibility that lives inside that experience. It doesn't try to resolve that tension. Instead of ‘Here’s what I actually meant…,’ it says: ‘Here is what it feels like to exist in the gap. Here is what that gap has taught me.’

Being misread isn’t random. It often follows the grooves of existing assumptions, stereotypes, power... Before you’ve spoken, a way of reading you has already arrived - you've been filed into a category that was there, waiting. The act of writing back into this is not only personal but can be a small act of resistance.

Led by award-winning writer Elia Isaac, Misread is a generative personal writing workshop for anyone who has ever had to work harder than they should to make themselves legible. That might mean navigating speech and communication differences, disability or chronic illness, or neurodivergence. It might mean the medical gaze that mistranslates your experience, the brain fog mid-sentence, the social anxiety, the pronoun that needs correcting again, the accent misplaced, the tone misjudged. It might mean race, class, age, mental health, or the quieter misreadings that don’t always have a name. It might mean all of these at once. Elia knows this territory from the inside: from the pauses and workarounds of a childhood stutter to the ongoing labour of being misread in their gender.

We will move through prompts that write into a specific scene of miscommunication, write from inside the space between meaning and reception, and write the workarounds we’ve developed to be understood - treating them not as limitations, but as forms.

No writing experience is needed. The prompts work across poetry, prose, monologue, lists and anything in between.


Come with the thing you’ve been trying to say. We’ll find a way to write towards it.



About Elia
Elia Isaac is an award-winning queer writer living in south east London, working across poetry, theatre and literary fiction. Growing up with a stutter, Elia turned to writing as a place where language could move at its own pace. That early relationship to language, shaped by its interruptions and workarounds, continues to inform their interest in intimacy, alienation, and the ways people attempt to make themselves legible to one another.

Elia won the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Competition and the 2025 Disabled Poetry Prize, and was runners-up in the 2025 Aurora Poetry Prize. Their work has recently been supported by Audible's Emerging Playwrights Fund, Spread the Word’s Writers Commissions, The Literary Consultancy’s 2026 Free Reads programme and a Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) award from Arts Council England. Elia is currently working towards their first novel.

Elia has led writing workshops for community and arts organisations, including the London Writers Centre and The Learning Cooperative. They are an alum of Roundhouse Poetry Collective, Barbican Young Poets, and Soho Writers' Lab.

Alongside their writing practice, Elia holds an MA in Political Philosophy, volunteers at their local community garden, and has recently returned from a period of solidarity activism in Palestine.

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