My Words

Roger Robinson

Wed, 10 May 2023 10:25:59 GMT

Roger Robinson is a writer and educator from Trinidad who has taught and performed worldwide. An alumnus of The Complete Works, he is also a co-founder of Spoke Lab poetry collective. His poetry has been featured in a number of prominent anthologies, including The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain and Bloodaxes’ Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets. His authored works include Suckle (flipped eye, 2009), The Butterfly Hotel (Peepal Tree Press, 2013), and A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press, 2019). A Portable Paradise won both the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2020 for a distinguished work evoking the spirit of a place – in this instance, post-Windrush Britain.

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SuAndi

Wed, 10 May 2023 09:57:07 GMT

SuAndi OBE is a poet, performance artist, dramatist, librettist and writer. Her three published collections are Style, Nearly Forty and There Will Be No Tears; her one-woman show The Story of M is on the curriculum for A level English Literature and the MA in Black British Literature at Goldsmiths.

In her role as the freelance Cultural Director of the National Black Arts Alliance, SuAndi has led members in training weekends, exhibitions and performances as well as producing three pieces of ground-breaking historical research: Afro Solo UK, Voices for Freedom, and Strength of Our Mothers. She is a Writing Fellow at Leicester University.

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Dean Atta

Wed, 10 May 2023 09:55:37 GMT

Dean Atta is a British author from London. He is a Malika's Poetry Kitchen member, National Poetry Day ambassador and LGBT+ History Month patron. Dean’s poems have been highly commended by the Forward Prizes for Poetry and shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. His books have been praised by the likes of Bernardine Evaristo, Benjamin Zephaniah and Malorie Blackman.

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Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Wed, 10 May 2023 09:54:00 GMT

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a British-born poet, writer and filmmaker of Ghanaian heritage. Born and raised in Essex, England, Bulley is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets, Octavia Poetry Collective and The Complete Works. Her debut poetry collection, Quiet (2022), circles around ideas of black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, and has been described as a ‘poetics of balance’. Also a filmmaker, Bulley directed MOTHER TONGUES, an intergenerational poetry, film and translation project exploring the indigenous linguistic heritages of poets of colour.

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Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Wed, 10 May 2023 09:51:56 GMT

Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a Ghanaian-British writer, poet and editor. Born in London, he grew up in Ghana and returned to the UK, where he became a vibrant new voice in British performance poetry. In 2001 he founded flipped eye, an independent publishing house which has played a key role in the development of many black British poets. He is the author of five poetry books, the most recent of which - The Geez (2020) - was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, described as navigating ‘the blurred lines between age and youth, the real and the imaged; what is seen and what is’. A constant advocate for African writers, Parkes was awarded Ghana’s National ACRAG award for poetry and literary activism. A trustee of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Parkes has also held teaching posts at the University of Southampton and California State University.

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Anthony Joseph

Wed, 10 May 2023 09:49:28 GMT

Anthony Joseph is an award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. Joseph began writing as a young child, and was heavily influenced by calypso, surrealism, jazz, Caribbean speech, and the spiritual Baptist church his grandparents attended. He has authored five poetry collections: Desafinado (1994), Teragaton (1998), Bird Head Son (2009), Rubber Orchestras (2011), and Sonnets For Albert (2022). Sonnets For Albert, shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, returns to the autobiographical Bird Head Son and measures the impact of being the son of a mostly absent father. His poems are most remarkable for their density of phrasing and use of description and melody, placing him within a Walcottian

lineage. A talented musician, Joseph is the lead vocalist for The Spasm Band and has released eight critically acclaimed albums. Other works include the novels Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon (2018) and The African Origins of UFOs (2006).

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Mimi Khalvati

Wed, 10 May 2023 09:46:19 GMT

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up on the Isle of Wight, England. She trained at Drama Centre London and has worked as an actor and director in the UK and Iran. Khalvati is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Weather Wheel, The Meanest Flower, and, most recently, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011. She co-founded The Poetry School - the UK’s largest provider of poetry education and opportunities to poets and poetry audiences - and was the Coordinator from 1997–2004. She is a core tutor for the School and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and in 2006 she received a Cholmondeley Award. Of her early influences, she cites Wordsworth and her childhood on the Isle of Wight as ‘very much the wellspring of my poetry’.

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Malika Booker

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 16:47:51 GMT

Malika Booker is a writer, poet, and multi-disciplinary artist. She is considered a pioneer of the spoken word movement in Britain and is the co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, a writers collective which has produced award-winning poets since its creation in 2001. She is the author of two poetry collections - Breadfruit (2007) and Pepper Seed (2013) - and her poetry features in numerous anthologies. In 2019 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Award for her contribution to poetry, and in 2020, her poem, ‘The Little Miracles’ won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She teaches Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Jacob Sam-La Rose

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 16:44:33 GMT

Jacob Sam-La Rose is one of the country’s most inspirational poets. He is the author of two poetry collections, Communion (2006) and Breaking Silence (2011), and his writing appears in many anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets (2010), Poems For Love (2009), and Red (2010), but it is his collective work across literature that has earned Sam-La Rose the title of ‘one-man literary industry’. Sam-La Rose has played a pivotal role in many projects that have been key to developing a generation of literary talents, such as Barbican Young Poets and the London Teenage Poetry SLAM. He has worked with the Ministry of Education in Malaysia, the British Council, the National Theatre, the Arvon Foundation, the Barbican, the Roundhouse and Apples & Snakes in mentoring young and emerging poets. He says, ‘My work as a poet came to mean more than just being the best writer I could be. For it to exist in the real world, my work has to be bigger than myself, in the same way that so many of my elders worked for the benefit of future generations – and so it extends into changing mainstream attitudes towards poetry, and helping to nurture other emerging poets.’ It is this generosity of spirit and collectivist outlook that sets him apart from many other poets and performers. His collection, Breaking Silence, is taught on the UK’s A-Level syllabus. He currently teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and at Goldsmiths University.

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Dorothea Smartt

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 16:38:24 GMT

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Francesca Beard

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 09:31:18 GMT

Francesca Beard is a British Malaysian writer and performance poet based in London. She has been described as ‘The Queen of British Performance Poetry’ (Metro). Since 1999, Beard has been performing poetry for live audiences, creating work that is interactive and improvisational. She has performed all over the world with the British Council, displaying a technique for repetition and rhyme that has seen her work described as “spine-tingling” (The Independent). “Performance poetry is so much about audience. It is a very interactive art form.” Beard has long been associated with Apples and Snakes, the London-based poetry organisation which has been a champion of performance poetry since its inception in 1982, and First Story, a writer development organisation that works with young people. Her poetry performances include Chinese Whispers (2003), Animal Olympics (2008), and her chapbook Cheap is on its fourth imprint.

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Will Harris

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 09:29:21 GMT

Will Harris is a poet, essayist and editor of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage, born and brought up in London. Published in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten: Poets of the New Generation, he is also an alumnus of The Complete Works. His pamphlet All this is implied (2017) won the London Review Bookshop’s Pamphlet of the Year, and in 2020, his debut poetry collection RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His writing explores mixed-heritage identity and cultural memory. Of poetry, he writes: ‘I imagine poems arising not out of an effort to describe the world but to communicate with a person. Rather than asserting control over an object – the imperial fantasy of ownership through naming – poems express a relationship between subjects.’ Harris teaches at The Poetry School and his second collection, Brother Poem, will be published in 2023.

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Pascale Petit

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 21:56:32 GMT

Pascale Petit is an award-winning poet with eight collections to her name. Born in Paris, Petit is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage, and grew up in Wales and France. She graduated from the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a sculptor before concentrating on poetry. Her writing draws very much from visual art, and this can be seen in her expressions of a mythic imagination as she writes the natural world. Her first collection, Heart of a Deer, was published in 1998, and was followed by The Zoo Father (2001) which earned her the first of four TS Eliot Prize nominations and a selection as a Next Generation poet. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica (2017), won the inaugural Laurel Prize (2020), and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize (2018), making it the first time this prize had been awarded to a work of poetry. Petit has also mentored many other poets through the Jerwood Compton Fellowship, The Complete Works, and Tate Modern. She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 - 2005, and, along with Mimi Khalvati, is a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School.

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Valerie Bloom

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 21:48:21 GMT

Valerie Bloom is a poet well known for her performances and literature for children. Born in Clarendon, Jamaica, Bloom trained and worked as a teacher before coming to Britain in 1979 to study English, African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent. She had always written poetry from a young age, and in 1983 Bloom published her first poetry collection, Touch mi! Tell me! with Bogle L'Ouverture, the radical London-based publishing house set up by Guyanese activists Jessica and Eric Huntley. This collection was followed by many more - Duppy Jamboree and Other Jamaican Poems (1991), The World is Sweet (2000), Let Me Touch The Sky (2000), Hot Like Fire (2002), and Whoop an’ Shout! (2003). Bloom cites Louise Bennet and Mikey Smith, two of Jamaica’s greatest poets, as her influences. Often praised for the orality of her poetry, Bloom’s poems can be characterised by her use of Jamaican Creole, Caribbean folk traditions, and musicality.

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John Lyons

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 21:46:00 GMT

John Lyons is a painter and poet, born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad & Tobago. He was introduced to poetry from a very young age, surrounded by songs and folklore. This seed of the link between poetry and music was planted in the young Lyons, and since then music, and the rhythm of words expressing emotions, thoughts and ideas, has been the beating heart of his poetry. After the death of his mother, Lyons grew up with his grandmother in rural Tobago and found solace in literature: “I read and read and read and got lost in books. That led me to writing.” He studied Design at Goldsmiths College, in London, then earned an Art Teaching diploma from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Lyons continued to write and paint all through his studies and the seventeen years he worked as a teacher in Manchester, and in 1987 won a number of poetry prizes: the Peterloo Poets Afro-Caribbean and Asian Prize, 2nd prize in the Cultureword Poetry Competition, a commendation in the National Poetry Competition, and in the Peterloo Poetry Competition. His first full collection of poems, Lure of the Cascadura, was published in 1989 by Bogle-L'Ouverture, the radical publishing house founded by Jessica and Eric Huntley. Calypso continues to be a heavy influence in Lyon’s poetry - he writes, reads and performs calypso-inspired poems in Trindadian Creole, and invites listeners to join in through call and response. His poetry has been published across 30 publications, including anthologies, magazines, and six full length collections. In 2003 he was awarded the Windrush Arts Achiever Award, and shortlisted in 2016 for the CLPE Children’s Poetry Award.

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Shazea Quraishi

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 21:41:48 GMT

Shazea Quraishi is a writer, teacher and translator who was born in Pakistan, and grew up in Canada before moving to London. She published her first collection, The Art of Scratching, in 2015, which revealed her flair for reimagining historical texts, and followed this with The Courtesan’s Reply, a long poem sequence in the voice of Indian courtesans from 300 BC, written in response to the Indian poet Manhoman Ghosh’s translation of the Caturbhani. The Courtesan’s Reply revisits the plays’ original depiction of the courtesans and gives a voice to the women as a counterpoint to the plays’ narrator, and Ghosh’s, male voice and gaze. Quraishi teaches at the Poetry School and is an artist in residence with Living Words. Her other poetry collections include The Taxidermist (2020), and The Glimmer (2022).

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Nick Makoha

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 20:47:22 GMT

Nick Makoha is a poet, playwright and creative entrepreneur. Born in Uganda in 1974, Makoha was forced to flee the country with his mother to escape Uganda’s civil war and dictator Idi Amin’s tyranny. A childhood hobby of poetry was put aside for a degree in biochemistry and a job in finance, but Makoha eventually decided to return to the craft. Upon quitting his London banking job, Makoha set fire to his suits, and says 'I did this to remind myself that I did not want an easy way back. I wanted to give my all to the art of writing.' His first poetry pamphlet, The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man (2005), launched flipped eye’s pamphlet series, and was followed by The Second Republic (2014) and The Resurrection Man (2015), which won the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and Brunel African Poetry Prize. The Kingdom of Gravity (2017), his first full-length collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In recent years, Makoha has coined the term ‘The Black Metic’ to describe the experience of black writers caught in an ambiguous state of hybridity in cultural space, e.g to be British and Ugandan, and the creative processes they use to navigate this. He has since founded The Obsidian Foundation, a creative community for black poets of African descent to develop their writing practice.

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