Joelle Taylor is a poet, playwright & author. She became the UK Slam champion in 2000 and founded  SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth Slam championship, where she served as artistic director & coach 2001 to 2018. Published works include Songs…

Celia A Sorhaindo is a poet from the Caribbean island of Dominica, where she now resides after living many years in the UK. Her poetry has been widely published in journals ranging from The Caribbean Writer to New Daughters of Africa, and longlisted for the UK National Poetry Competition (2017/18). Her first pamphlet, ‘Guabancex’ (Papillote Press, 2020) was longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean literature, and her poem ‘Weather Conditions’ was among the winners of Poetry Archive’s WordView 2020 Collection. Her first full length poetry collection, ‘Radical Normalisation’, is due to be published in the autumn of 2022 (Carcanet Press).  

Nii Ayikwei Parkes grew up in Ghana but was born in the UK where he later returned for further study, where with the friendship and tutelage of fellow black poets he became a vibrant new voice in British performance poetry.