Deptford Literature Festival

Founded by Tice Cin, Neoprene Genie is a label, production company and discovery vehicle. Through Neoprene Genie Tice has run sold-out events at Post Bar, Reference Point and TANK Mag HQ.

Neoprene Genie and friends are launching Deptford Literature Festival with soft soft on Friday 15 March.

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Poetry 2020 and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize and the Polari Prize. Her previous collections include In These Days of Prohibition, which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2017. Caroline’s latest play, Red Ellen, about the labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, was shortlisted for the 2021 George Devine Award. Caroline’s latest book is her selected poems, Rookie, published by Carcanet in 2022.

Dean Atta is an award-winning Black British author and poet of Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage whose works have received praise from Bernardine Evaristo and Malorie Blackman. His novel in verse, The Black Flamingo, about a Black gay teen finding his voice through poetry and drag performance, won the Stonewall Book Award and was shortlisted for numerous further prestigious awards. His poetry collection, There is (still) love here, explores acceptance, queer joy and the power of unapologetically being yourself and fully embracing who you are. Dean was born and raised in London, where he still lives.

SL Grange is a poet, theatre-maker, audio-describer and Open Space facilitator. Poetry Wales pamphlet competition 2021 winner Bodies and Other Haunted Houses is out now from Seren Books/ Poetry Wales.

Inua Ellams is an award-winning poet and playwright based in Deptford. He was trained by national poetry organisation, Apples & Snakes in their Poets In Education Scheme, Inua further developed his skills as facilitator by travelling the world and running accessible classes for educational, arts and corporate organisations from Malaysia to Australia, Libya to South Africa. He has worked with all ages from Primary to University, teaching various aspects of poetry and playwriting, or using them to teach history, mathematics and philosophy.

Jacqueline Crooks is a Jamaican-born British writer and community development worker, living in South East London. She writes stories about migration and sub-cultures. Jacqueline’s debut novel, Fire Rush, was published by Jonathan Cape in March 2023 and was shortlisted for both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Waterstones Debut Author Prize. ​The novel is about dub reggae, love, loss, freedom, and Black Womanhood. The Guardian newspaper named Jacqueline as one of top ten 2023 debut novelists. Jacqueline has a BSc (Hons, 1st) from Roehampton University where she studied social policy and an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths University. Her writing draws on her lived experiences as well as her work in the community setting where she supports grass-roots global-majority charities and organisations. She is the recipient of Arts Council England Individual Artist and The Society of Authors grants for her writing. Jacqueline’s stories have been published by Peepal Tree Press, Woven Tale Press, Virago, Granta, Mslexia, and Vanguard Readings. Jacqueline’s debut short story collection, The Ice Migration, was published by Peepal Tree Press. It was long-listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize, Political Fiction category. Her stories have been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She has also written stories for BBC Radio 4. She is listed in the Breaking Ground list of the best British Writers of Colour. Jacqueline has been funded by Arts Council England and the Society of Authors.

Emma Warren, based in Lewisham, has been documenting grassroots music culture for decades. She is the author of ‘Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre’ (2019), which was a MOJO book of the year and was re-released by Chicago record label International Anthem; her pamphlet ‘Steam Down: Or How Things Begin’ (2019), which was published by Rough Trade Books and was named an Irish Times read of the year; and ‘Document Your Culture: A Manual’ (2020). Warren was a founding contributor to Jockey Slut magazine and worked at The Face and as the editorial mentor at youth-run Brixton publication Live Magazine. Her monthly radio show on Worldwide FM ran for six years.

Aniefiok ‘Neef’ Ekpoudom is an author from South London who documents the people, voices and communities of modern Britain. His first book Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain is a social history of British Rap. It was released with Faber & Faber in January 2024.

Ashani Lewis is a novelist and short-story writer based in London. Her debut novel, Winter Animals, was released last month with Dialogue Books, and her upcoming collection of short stories is due out later this year. Winter Animals is a dark meditation on the dangers and seductive power of youthful idealism, and the slippages between friendship and love, set in the mountains of North America. Ashani’s writing has won the Tower Poetry Prize and the Alpine Fellowship Writing Competition, as well as being featured in Harper’s Bazaar and Joyland. She was a winner of the London Writers Awards 2021 in their literary fiction category. She’s currently working on her second novel, which will be published in 2025.

Jody Burton lives in Lewisham and is a Librarian who has worked in both public and college libraries. Prior to this, her background was in adult education. She has always had a passion for Black history and art, and completed her degree in Caribbean History in the 1990s in North London and her PGCE at the University of Greenwich.

Rashmi Sirdeshpande is a lawyer turned children’s author, with two young children who ask her lots of questions. Rashmi writes non-fiction picture books that ignite children’s curiosity, as well as fictional stories that crackle with imagination. When she’s not playing with words, you’ll find her on her yoga mat twisting herself into all sort of shapes

Daniel Sluman is a poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, and he has published three poetry collections with Nine Arches Press. His most recent collection, single window was released in September 2021, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

Alice Frecknall is a poet and short fiction writer. Her debut poetry collection, Somewhere Something is Burning, is published by Out-Spoken Press (2021). Her writing has been widely anthologised, including in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, berlin lit, And Other Poems, bath magg, fourteen poems, and Butcher’s Dog, and was most recently shortlisted for the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry 2023 and The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023. She was previously shortlisted for the Lightship International Short Story Prize, and the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry 2022 and 2019. Alice has an MA in Creative Writing, is a Roundhouse Poetry Collective alumna, and member of the UniSlam Post-Emerging Cohort. She has read her work at venues and festivals across the country, facilitated writing workshops for members of the public, and regularly writes with The Poetry Takeaway.

Caroline Druitt is a poet and creative living in South East London. She graduated from the Creative and Life Writing MA at Goldsmiths in 2022. She facilitates creative writing, well-being and movement workshops at a number of schools, universities, corporations and in her local community. She runs popular creative writing and poetry clubs at a variety of schools in South East London and tutors privately with children and young adults. In 2020 she was a part of Apples and Snakes Platform Poets collective for emerging poets. Caroline’s poems have been published by Lucent Dreaming, New River Press, Trope and The Poetry Business’  The North Magazine and commissioned by Apples and Snakes. In 2023 she was long-listed for the Outspoken Prize for Page Poetry, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and commended in the National Poetry Competition in 2023. With support from Arts Council England she is currently working on her first collection of poetry.

Helen Bowell is a poet and producer based in London. Her debut pamphlet The Barman was published by Bad Betty Press in 2022, and selected as the Poetry Book Society Summer 2022 Pamphlet Choice. She runs the Bi+ Lines project for bi+ poets, and will edit the first anthology of bi+ poets in English with fourteen poems in 2023. She is also a co-director of Dead [Women] Poets Society, an Arts Council England-funded collective which seeks to ‘resurrect’ women poets of the past through events and online. On their behalf, she co-guest-edited the Autumn 2020 Modern Poetry in Translation focus on dead women poets in Autumn 2020. She produces events at the Poetry Translation Centre and for seven years worked in The Poetry Society’s Education team. Helen is a Ledbury Poetry Critic with reviews in Magma, The North, Poetry Wales and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She is a graduate of The Writing Squad, the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, London Writers Awards and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. She was a commended Foyle Young Poet in 2010 and 2011. She was commended in the 2021/22 Magma Poetry Competition, the 2021 Verve Poetry Competition and Winchester Poetry Festival Prize, and the 2020 Mslexia Poetry Competition. In 2020, she won the Bronze Creative Future Writers’ Award. She was Poetry Business’s first digital Poet in Residence in February 2021 and during the summer of 2021 wrote “”plant portraits”” for visitors to Kew Garden. Her poems and translations have appeared in Poetry London, Magma, Ambit, Under the Radar, bath magg, fourteen poems, Tentacular, Where Else: An International Hong Kong Anthology (Verve, 2023), 100 Poems To Save The Earth (Seren, 2021), The Book of Bad Betties (Bad Betty Press, 2021), Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets (2017) and elsewhere. As a facilitator, she has run poetry and reviewing workshops for young people for The Writing Squad and The Poetry Society; and poetry workshops for adults for Creative Future, Spread the Word, Poetry Translation Centre, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, fourteen poems and Queer Circle.

Remi Graves is a London based poet and drummer. A former Barbican Young Poet, Remi’s work has been commissioned by St Paul’s Cathedral, Barbican and BBC Radio 4. Remi has taught at The Poetry School and performed at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Tate Modern and more. Remi’s debut pamphlet with your chest will be published by Fourteen Poems in Sep 2022.

Kareem Parkins-Brown is a writer and visual artist. He is a proud Northwest Londoner, Barbican alumnus and won the Roundhouse Poetry Slam in 2019. His show called Do Nitties Live Forever was commissioned by the Battersea Arts Centre and is an ode to his estate before they finish knocking it down. He was shortlisted for Young People’s Laureate for London and the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His work concerns hood life circa 2005 – present day.

Alex Falase-Koya is a London native. He has been both reading and writing since he was a teenager; anything at the cross-section of social commentary and genre fiction floats his boat. He was a winner of Spread the Word’s 2019 London Writers Awards for YA/children’s. He lives in London with his girlfriend and two cats. He is the co writer of Marcus Rashford’s children’s fiction series The Breakfast Club Adventures. His books include the bestselling Marv and the Robots series, with Marv and the Ultimate Superpower being selected for World Book Day 2024.

Femi Fadubga currently writes young adult sci-fi novels, with his debut novel, The Upper World, set to be a Netflix feature film, starring Daniel Kaluuya. In prior lives, Femi worked as a management consultant, solar financier, theoretical physicist and science tutor. He earned his Master’s from Oxford, where he published in Quantum Computing, and subsequently studied as a Thouron Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He currently lives between Peckham, London and Baltimore, USA. The Upper World is his first book.

Laurie Bolger is a Lewisham based writer & founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. Her work has featured at Glastonbury, the Royal Albert Hall, TATE, Sky Arts & BBC platforms. Laurie has been running creative workshops for the past decade allowing people to celebrate their unique voices.

Gemma Bolger, founder of gem & i yoga, has practised and taught worldwide and is delighted to bring her practice to all ages including kids, to various studios, gyms, schools, corporate settings, or the comfort of your own home.

Oisín McKenna is an award-winning writer and artist, working in theatre, video, and fiction. His work has been supported by Arts Council England and Arts Council Ireland, and he has worked with the BBC, ICA, DAZED, Hackney Showroom, The Abbey Theatre, Dublin Fringe Festival, Project Arts Centre and more. His debut novel ‘Evenings and Weekends’ will be published by Fourth Estate (UK) and Mariner Books (US) in 2024. He is a recipient of a 2022 London Writers Award. He makes work about love, money, health and history. He’s interested in the ways that political, economic and social conditions shape how we act, think, and feel at particular places and times. He writes about the mundane details of people’s daily lives in order to tell a bigger story about the world.

Sarah Marsh was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish prize in 2019 and selected for the London Library Emerging Writers programme in 2020. A Sign of Her Own is her first novel, inspired by her experiences of growing up deaf and her family’s history of deafness. She lives in London.

Aliya Gulamani (she/her) is a South London based award-winning commissioning editor at Unbound – the world’s first crowdfunding publisher. She is also the Editorial Lead for Unbound Firsts, an imprint for debut writers of colour. In 2022, Aliya was selected as one of the Bookseller’s Rising Stars and awarded The Ola Gotkowska Young Independent Publisher of the Year Award. Aliya is also a manuscript assessment reader for The Literary Consultancy, and is currently a Trustee at Bookworks.

Eishar Brar is Editorial Director at Knights Of, an inclusive publisher focused on publishing underrepresented voices. In her role she creates space for non-trauma led narratives and aims to widen the scope of Own Voices publishing through her commissioning.

Marianne Tatepo is the founder of the Black Agents & Editors’ Group (BAE) and the Publishing Director for the Penguin Random House non-fiction imprint, Square Peg (Vintage). Previously, Marianne was Commissioning Editor for Ebury Press & Pop Press (Penguin Random House UK), publishing nonfiction books, with a focus on lifestyle and illustrated publications.

Quynh Giao Nguyen was born and raised in Hanoi, Vietnam where she taught Vietnamese and French at the Vietnam National University, was an active participant in the Hanoi Poet Network and worked as a tour operator and guide, showcasing the beauty of Vietnamese culture to foreigners. In 1994, Quynh moved to London, England but has never forgotten her roots. Her love for Vietnam and its people led her to found and run the charity: Vietnamese Family Partnership (VFP) which supports the community with guidance during hardship, translation services, language classes and cultural events. The school has previously won the British Academy School Language Award. In addition, Quynh has been delivering corporate Vietnamese language training to young people and adults in the UK since 2000, and has extensive translation experience in both corporate and public sectors.

April Yee‘s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have won or been listed for The Best American Essays, Ivan Juritz Prize, Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, Manchester Poetry Prize, and Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. A Harvard alumna and former journalist, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to London, where she has served as a Refugee Journalism Project mentor and The Georgia Review’s editor-in-residence. Her work has been supported by the National Book Critics Circle, Ledbury Poetry Critics, the Southbank Centre, and the University of East Anglia, where she is a Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Scholar.

Bridget Minamore is a writer from and based in south-east London. She has written with the National Theatre’s New Views programme and the Royal Opera House. As a poet, she has read her work nationally and internationally and has been commissioned by Historic England, the BBC, Tate Modern, Nike, and ESPN.In 2017 she became the youngest person, and first woman, to be the lead tutor for the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Her BBC R4 documentary Lines of Resistance—on the poetic history of women of colour’s writing—was a Radio Times pick of the week. As an editor and Dramaturg, she has worked with artists Selina Thompson and Katie Greenall, Company Three, and the Young Vic. As a journalist, Bridget has been a contributor to The Guardian and has written on a freelance basis for Pitchfork, The Stage, Exeunt, The Fader, and The White Review. In 2018 she co-founded Critics of Colour with playwright Sabrina Mahfouz, a collective for UK-based people of colour which aims to make writing about theatre, dance, and/or opera more accessible. Titanic (Out-Spoken Press), her debut pamphlet of poems on modern love and loss, came out in May 2016. She has also been published in Five Dials, and anthologies New Daughters of Africa and Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art, and Making It Happen.

Rees Nicolas was born and raised in south London. He has been involved in anti-police and anti-border organising for the past decade. His writing is concerned with working-class knowledge production and radical education. He translates from Italian and writes the occasional essay. His translation of Romano Alquati’s Per Fare Conricerca is forthcoming with Notes from Below.

Natty Kasambala is a London-based writer, director and broadcaster. Previously an editor at both gal-dem and Dazed magazine, her work covering music, arts & culture has been featured in the likes of Vogue, The Guardian, i-D, GQ, Rolling Stone, CNN, Evening Standard and more. She’s also voiced work for gal-dem, Selfridges, Google Arts & Culture and appeared on BBC Radio 4, Foundation FM, Reprezent and Monocle Radio.

Sara Jafari is a British-Iranian author and editor, based in New Cross. She is the author of The Mismatch and People Change (Penguin Random House, 2021 and 2023). People Change will be published as People Like Us by St. Martin’s Press in early 2025. Longlisted for Spread the Word’s Life Writing Prize, her writing has also been published in gal-dem and The Good Journal, among other publications. She is also a contributor of the essay collection “”I Will Not Be Erased””: Our stories about growing up as people of colour (Walker Books, 2019), and Who’s Loving You (Trapeze, 2021). She also single-handedly runs TOKEN Magazine, a literary and arts print magazine featuring under-represented writers and artists. She has worked in the publishing industry for over six years, most recently working at Puffin, Penguin Random House where she worked as an editor, actively commissioning young fiction, middle-grade and YA/crossover non-fiction and fiction titles. She currently works as an editor on a freelance basis for publishers and individuals.

Amber Obasi is a Black, queer, South London raised British-Nigerian. Her love of literature stems from her love of daydreaming and imagining new worlds. Following the tradition of writers like Edouard Glissant and Lola Olufemi, she believes that harnessing our collective imaginations is the first step towards transforming our realities. Currently, Amber works primarily as a Policy Officer for The Trussell Trust. Additionally she works in creative spaces, running sessions and delivering workshops that are community-focused. Earlier this year Amber was named as a Black Heritage Young Producer for the Museum of London where she co-created the publication Toil: Unearthing Abolition.

Bernadette Russell is a Deptford based author, performance storyteller, theatre maker, workshop facilitator, cabaret MC, playwright and tree planter. She performs her own stories as well as traditional stories everywhere, including cabarets, sheltered housing, schools, parks, gardens, forests, vintage clothes shops, launderettes, beaches, in people’s beds, once even inside a Police Box! Her most recent book How To Be Hopeful is out now.

Joanna Brown writing as J.T. Williams has been a primary school teacher and after teaching full-time, became a programme manager at the Royal African Society leading creative writing schools workshops for the literature festival Africa Writes. Now a freelance educator and writer, her debut series The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries, published by HarperColins, is a middle grade mystery full of daring adventure in Georgian London.

Troy Fairclough has an M.A. in ‘Media’, from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a B.A. in ‘Arts’ from Glasgow University. Based in South London, he previously worked as a ‘Community Worker’, and was the ‘Development Manager’ for TS2k, a government funded project, set up to help people find careers in the ‘Creative Industries’. Black Gay Ink is a creative writing development scheme for emerging Black gay writers. It provides a safe space specifically for Black gay men.

Selali Fiamanaya is a fiction writer from Glasgow. He found the pen through radical zine collectives at university and beyond. He’s an alumnus of Spread the Word supported workshops Black Gay Ink and The Future Is Back, and a recipient of the Curtis Brown Inaugural Scholarship for Black Novel writers, where he developed his novel Before We Hit the Ground. This went on to win him a major publishing contract and an international agent through two separate prize submissions, whilst still unfinished. He’s indebted to community-based writing organisations, and champions their role in supporting underrepresented writers to get their stories out.

Ioana Simion is an artist-educator and facilitator based in East London. She runs creative workshops under the artistic identity of Artizine UK. Her socially-engaged art practice explores the use of zine-making as a vehicle to empower individuals to share their stories, develop imaginative skills and practice wellbeing in a social setting. Ioana is passionate about participation and amplifying community spaces where people with no former arts training can receive support to expand on their experiences and skills. Since 2019, she’s been collaborating with artists, not for profits and art galleries to design and deliver art workshops which celebrate the joy of making and the process behind it.

Connor S Hardy is an educator and professional who works with familitation, emotion, health and relationship education, and transforming conflict.

Sierra Hope is a short-form poet who is hosting the ‘Black-out Poetry’ workshop at Deptford Literature Festival 2024 for The Rainbow Exchange and Community Bookswap.

Jamie Hale is a Lewisham based award-winning theatre maker, poet, (screen)writer, charity CEO and founder and Artistic Director at CRIPticArts. They focus creatively on crip- and queer- realities, and the urgency of living as a disabled person. Their poetry pamphlet, Shield was published in 2021. In 2021, their poetry pamphlet, Shield was published, they were awarded a Jerwood Poetry Fellowship, and won Director/ Theatremaker of the Year Award for NOT DYING in the Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund Awards. Jamie founded CRIPtic x Spread the Word online retreat for deaf and disabled writers in 2020, and ran it in 2021. They have been published in magazines including Magma and the Rialto, guest-edited the Bodies issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, and are working on their first full poetry collection.

Pascale Petit was born in Paris and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage. Her eighth collection of poetry, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and for Wales Book of the Year. Her seventh, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017), won the inaugural Laurel Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Four previous collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.  Pascale was a co-founder of The Poetry School, and has been Chair of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Laurel Prize. Her debut novel, My Hummingbird Father, is due from Salt in 2024.

Stephen Lightbown is a Blackburn-born, Bristol-based poet and disability rights champion. Paralysed following an accident in 1996 when he was sixteen, Stephen uses his poems to give a voice to his disability. He has spoken at events across the UK and at festivals such as Shambala, WOMAD, Verve Poetry Festival and Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival. In addition, Stephen has read internationally in San Antonio, Texas. His poems have been widely anthologised, and is the author of two poetry collections Only Air and The Last Custodian, both published by Burning Eye Books. In September 2023 he will publish his first poetry book for children, And I climbed, And I Climbed, through Troika Books. He lives in Bristol in the UK, and in November will represent England for the second time at the ISA World Para Surf Championships in California.

Jameisha Prescod FRSA is an artist-filmmaker, producer and writer from South London. Specialising in documentary, experimental film, video journalism and immersive visual art, they are driven by authentic storytelling and apply creative digital techniques to uncover powerful human experiences. Jameisha is also the founder and creative director of You Look Okay To Me, the online space for chronic illness. They explore the social and cultural aspects of living with a chronic condition through visual mediums. Since the project’s inception, the community has grown to almost 30,000 online. Added to their work as a visual artist, they are also a writer and was recently included in a republishing of Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill.” Jameisha is currently a resident artist at Forma Arts London and a trustee for London Arts in Health Forum.

*AMPLE Collective is an intergenerational neurodivergent collective co-founded by Sofia Lyall and Jacqueline Ennis Cole. Sofia Lyall writes poems, short stories, and nonfiction essays on themes related to autism, communication, and the environment. Their writing has been published by Porridge, Visual Verse, smiths, and Blister and she presented a paper at Nottingham Contemporary Gallery’s Language Matters symposium. Jacqueline Ennis Cole writes non-fiction essays on local ecologies and environmental justice, as well as speculative and experimental poems. Her ongoing non-fiction writings are published by WORMS Magazine and experimental form presented at Whitechapel Radio Station Space with Theatrum Mundi and at Nottingham Contemporary gallery’s Language Matters symposium.

Yaz Nin is a Kibris born, London raised writer. Her short plays have been staged across the UK, her poetry published in several publications including Oxford poetry, 14magazine and Propel (online). In 2023 her full length play Mount View Road was longlisted for the woven prizes award.

Zoë McWhinney is a Visual Vernacular performer and a poet in British Sign Language (BSL), honoured with British Deaf Associations’ Poet Laureate silver title. As a Deaf person and native BSL signer, she works as a freelance theatre maker, consultant and workshop facilitator in BSL storytelling, poetry and Deaf culture. As an actress, she performed internationally both on stage and in films. Over the last 5 years, she participated in national and international Visual Vernacular shows and championships both on and offline; and graduated from University of Birmingham (BA International Relations and Political Science) and École de Théâtre Universelle in Toulouse. The iconic and visual-based bilingual poetry and VV pieces she creates and performs are insights inspired by her own personal life as an ocularcentric human being with in-depth physical language knowledge from a lifetime as a singer.

James Wilkes lives in Lewisham and writes poetry, short fiction and performance texts, and collaborates across disciplines and art-forms. He has been writer-in-residence at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, the Medical Museion (Copenhagen), the Wellcome Collection and Exeter Cathedral. His most recent book of poems is Mille Regretz: Chansons After Josquin des Prez (Pamenar Press, 2022) and his work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Datableed, The White Review, gorse, The Stinging Fly and The Kenyon Review. Recent performance/ installation venues have included the National Poetry Library, Metal Southend, South London Gallery, Aarhus Litteraturcenter and Kings Place, London.

Joe Rizzo Naudi is a London-based writer and facilitator. In 2022 he was awarded a London Writers Award by Spread The Word and received an Arts Council England grant to develop literature and performance projects exploring blindness. He has presented his work at the Wellcome Collection, the BFI Southbank, Brixton House, Vault Festival, Rich Mix and the ICA.

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. Her debut pamphlet I Am Evidence is published by Bloodaxe Books. She is a winner of the Eric Gregory Award, Michael Marks Award, Bridport Prize Young Writers Award and Mslexia Women’s Pamphlet Prize. She was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award’s Poetry Prize, the Bridport Poetry Prize and the Poetry Wales Pamphlet competition. She was longlisted for the Rebecca Swift Women Poets’ Prize and The Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in Magma Poetry, Poetry Wales, The White Review, Stand Magazine, Bath Magg, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Anthropocene Poetry Journal and The Adriatic Magazine. Her work has been anthologised by Anamot Press, Bridport Prize, Re.creation, Peekash Press, Bad Betty Press and Flipped Eye Press. She is an alumna of The London Library Emerging Writers Programme, Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, Barbican Young Poets, Obsidian Foundation Retreat, Griots Well Collective and Roundhouse Poetry Collective. She has performed at Glastonbury Festival, Brainchild Festival and UKYA City Takeover. She has been commissioned by the Museum of London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Apples and Snakes, Victoria & Albert Museum, Guildhall, Tate Britain, The African Centre, BBC 1Xtra, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Spread the Word.

Lola Oh is a Brit(ish) poet, writer and facilitator, born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father. Based in South London, Lola uses her work to explore family, loss, and ideas of black womanhood.Lola was shortlisted for the 2023 White Review Poet’s Prize, and is currently a member of Griot’s Well. She is a Roundhouse Poetry Collective alum, a Barbican Young Poet Alumn, a 2021 Roundhouse Slam Finalist, and has been featured by Apples and Snakes, BBC1xtra, English Touring Theatre, BoxedIn and Roundhouse’s The Last Word Festival.

Jay Bernard is a writer and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores issues of queerness, race and archiving through a critical lens. Based in New Cross, their short films, artwork and literary collections have been exhibited at film festivals and galleries UK wide, and they were the recipient of the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, and the 2017 Ted Hughes Award.

Ayesha Chougley is a writer and multimedia artist with a passion for storytelling. Her work often focuses on illness and disability, bringing emotion to overly clinical subjects, and opening up safe spaces for conversation. She is interested in the ways that disability changes our perception of the world, and works with imperfection to create new ways of looking. She has shown her poetry and artwork at many exhibitions, including a Poetry Jukebox at Belfast International Arts Festival, an online exhibition titled Sick Artists Club, at Mr W et al, a celebratory event exploring art and disability in Hackney Wick, and in Deaf Experience, an online short film screening of work by deaf and hard-of hearing creators, organised by The Film Bunch. She enjoys working with other creative people, and was one of the photographers for Anahita Harding’s performance at the Tate Modern for WAIWAV. Her background is in Fine Art, and she feels that this encourages new perspectives within her writing.

Shani Akilah is a Black-British Caribbean fiction writer and screenwriter from South London. She is a book influencer, co-founded the Nyah Network, a book club for Black women and was a literary judge for the Nota Bene Prize. She has a Masters degree in African Studies from Oxford University and is the the current artist-in-residence at Woolwich Works, spearheading the Orange Room Collective, a new community initiative which seeks to profile Black creatives in the area. Her debut short story collection ‘For Such A Time As This’ will be published by Oneworld in June 2024.

Bobby Nayyar is a programme manager, publisher and writer. He started his career in publishing at Faber and Faber, Little, Brown Book Group and founded his own imprint, Limehouse Books. He has also managed Equality in Publishing and Wasafiri Magazine’s digital presence. At Spread the Word he works on the London Writers Awards, Life Writing Prize and regular programme of workshops and events. He has written two novels and a collection of poetry.

Caleb Femi, the writer and director featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture. His debut collection ‘POOR’ won the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection as well as making the shortlist for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Caleb has directed TV episodes for HBO and the BBC. He has written and directed short films for the BBC and Channel 4. He has been commissioned by Tate Modern, the Royal Society for Literature, St Paul’s Cathedral, the BBC, the Guardian and more. In 2022, Femi directed the Louis Vuitton Men’s 20222 runway show and has also directed campaign films for Mulberry, TikTok, Bottega Veneta, NCS and other global brands. Between 2016-2018 he was the Young People’s Laureate for London, working with young people on a city, national and global level.

Natasha Brown is a British novelist. She was a 2019 London Writers Award recipient and a 2022 Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. Her debut novel Assembly was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction.

Leone Ross has been writing the fantastical – erotic horror, magic realism, Caribbean-flavoured fantasy – for decades and is best known for her critically acclaimed novel This One Sky Day/Popisho (Faber, 2021) and her collection of weird and wonderful short stories in Come Let Us Sing Anyway (Peepal Tree Press, 2019). Most recently, she is the editor of Glimpse, the first-ever collection of Black British speculative fiction (Peepal Tree Press, 2022).

Jamie is one of the three Jerwood Poetry Fellows for 2021-2022, a previous winner of the London Writers’ Awards for poetry, and curator of the CRIPtic x Spread the Word d/Deaf and disabled writers’ salon and retreat. Their first poetry pamphlet, Shield was published by Verve Poetry Press in January 2021.

Joshua Idehen is a poet, teacher and musician. A British-born Nigerian, his poetry has been published widely and he has performed across Europe. His interest in the impact of gentrification and the closure of music venues led him to create the online fanzine anothergreatnightout.com, to celebrate Passing Clouds, one of the first venues he played in. He has collaborated with Mercury nominated artists The Comet Is Coming and Sons of Kemet. The album Last Night with dance pop band Benin City was released in 2018 (Moshi Moshi Music). He is currently working on his debut poetry collection and a one man show.

Nadine was born and lives in London and is a Criminal Solicitor.

​In 2016, she won the City University Crime Writing Competition and completed the Creative Writing (Crime/Thriller Novels) MA at City University of London with Distinction in 2018.

In 2019, The Jigsaw Man was won by HQ (HarperCollins) in a six-publisher auction. The best-selling Jigsaw Man’ was published in 2021 and has been translated into 15 languages.

Her second novel, The Binding Room, featuring DI Henley and the Serial Crimes Unit was published in July 2022.

Dapo Adeola is an illustrator, author and character designer who was awarded Illustrator of the Year at The British Book Awards in 2022. Dapo rocketed into the picture book world with his greatly acclaimed illustrator debut, Look Up!, written by Nathan Bryon and published by Puffin in 2019, which won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in 2020. Dapo illustrated My Dad is a Grizzly Bear and My Mum Is a Lioness written by award-winning author Swapna Haddow (both published by Macmillan Children’s Books), and collaborated with Malorie Blackman on their picture book We’re Going to Find the Monster!

Dapo made his author debut in 2021 with the Puffin published picture book Hey You!: An Empowering Celebration of Growing Up Black, featuring 18 talented Black British illustrators, which also went on to win Illustrated book of the year at The British Book Awards in 2022.

Born in Britain and of Nigerian heritage, Dapo is an avid believer in the importance of equal representation in the creative arts. He currently lives in London.

Remi Graves is a London based poet and drummer. A former Barbican Young Poet, Remi’s work has been commissioned by St Paul’s Cathedral, Barbican and BBC Radio 4. Remi has taught at The Poetry School and performed at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Tate Modern and more. Remi’s debut pamphlet with your chest was published by Fourteen Poems in September 2022.

Khairani Barokka (b. Jakarta, 1985) is a writer, poet and artist in London. She’s a practice-based researcher, whose work centres disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. Among her honours, she was Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, the first non-British Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow, and is currently UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation and Research Fellow at University of the Arts London.

Okka is the writer/performer/producer of, among others, a deaf-accessible, solo poetry/art show, Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee. It premiered at Edinburgh Fringe 2014 as Indonesia’s only representative, with a grant from HIVOS. She was recognized in 2014 by UNFPA as one of Indonesia’s “Inspirational Young Leaders Driving Social Change”, for highly prolific, pioneering international work in justice-oriented arts.

Published internationally in anthologies and journals, Okka has presented work extensively, in fifteen countries, is a frequent public speaker, and has been awarded various residencies, grants and award nominations, including a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is author and illustrator of poetry-art book Indigenous Species, nominated for a Goldsmiths Public Engagement Award (Tilted Axis Press, 2016; Vietnamese translation out in 2018 with AJAR Press), author of poetry collection Rope (Nine Arches Press, 2017), co-editor with Ng Yi-Sheng of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Fixi, 2016), and co-editor, with Sandra Alland and Daniel Sluman, of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, 2017), shortlisted for a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology and a Poetry School Book of the Year. Work is published in Poetry Review, The Rialto, Ambit, Magma, Wasafiri, Stand, The New Inquiry, Asymptote, and other journals, anthologies and art books. She is a member of the collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and received a PhD by Practice in Goldsmiths’ Visual Cultures Department, as an LPDP Scholar. Okka is currently working on a book and visual works. Her most recent commission is a large-scale digital collage and poetry series for Wellcome Collection. Her latest book, poetry collection Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches Press) was published in March 2021, and was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

Daniel Sluman is a 34-year-old poet and disability rights activist based in London.

Born in Gloucestershire, he gained a first in his BA in English at University of Gloucestershire, and a distinction in his MA at the same institution.

Daniel’s writing first began to be published whilst studying at University, and in 2012 his debut poetry collection Absence has a weight of its own was published to critical acclaim by Nine Arches Press. He was named one of Huffington Post’s Top 5 British Poets to Watch in 2015, the same year his second book the terrible was released. Daniel has recently co-edited the first major UK Disability Poetry Anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back with Sandra Alland and Khairani Barokka. He has previously held editing roles at Iota and Dead Ink, and he has studied towards a PHD in disability poetics, funded by an AHRC award from Midlands3Cities. His third collection, single window, was published through Nine Arches Press in September 2021, and you can read a review of it in The Guardian.

He tweets @danielsluman.

Jody Burton is an Author and Librarian who has worked in both public and college libraries. Prior to this, her background was in adult education. She has always had a passion for Black History and Art. She completed her degree in Caribbean History in the 1990s in North London and her PGCE at the University of Greenwich.

From 2016 to 2019 she hosted a Black Arts Group via Meetup. As a bibliophile and working in public libraries she was aware and frustrated by the lack of Black British History books available, particularly during BHM when the default still appears to be Black American History. She believes history is about recognition, respect, and the representation of all our stories. For her, Black History is British history in all its challenges and triumphs.

Jody is co-author alongside Avril Nanton of the Black History London Map (Blue Crow Media 2022) and the book Black London: History, Art and Culture in over 120 Places (Inkspire 2021).

Laurie has written & worked with major brands including EY, Nationwide, Small Luxury Hotels & Google as well as working with charities such as Mind, Coppafeel & Choose Love.

Laurie’s recent work includes ‘Talking to Strangers’ a theatre show about community & the kindness, something which features at the heart of her work. Laurie is currently working on her first full length play & a second collection of poetry; Call Me Lady.

Laurie has been running creative workshops for the past decade allowing people to celebrate their own unique voices & individuality. She is the founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club & runs various wellness events with her sister and yoga instructor Gem & i Yoga combining movement, writing & books.

Anna Wood has written for Mojo, The Quietus, Dazed and Caught By The River, and has had stories featured in the Guardian, the Canongate anthology My Old Man and the 3 of Cups anthology Outsiders. Anna Wood has an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation in Sozopol. She was the winner of the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize 2018/19. Her debut collection of stories YES YES MORE MORE was published in 2021. She lives in London.

Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer living in London. She is the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize in 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, Frieze and Prototype. Her debut story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published in 2021 and was named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2021. It was shortlisted for both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize in 2022. Her short story Green Afternoon was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2022.

Photo by Lewis Khan.

Alice is a writer, editor and ex-bookseller from London. She co-hosts the literary podcast What Page Are You On?, and edited Outsiders: A Short Story Anthology (3 of Cups Press). Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and appeared in Dear Damsels, Cunning Folk, and On Anxiety (3 of Cups Press). Her first novel, Death of a Bookseller, is published in April 2023.

Oakley Flanagan is a writer and poet from the West Midlands, by way of Ireland. As a playwright: ‘This Queer House’, VAULT Festival, directed by Masha Kevinovna, produced by OPIA Collective. They have received development as a playwright from Birmingham REP, National Theatre and The Royal Court. Their poetry appears in bath magg, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The North, Under the Radar and Wasafiri, as well as anthologised work for 3 of Cups Press, Hachette UK, Trapeze and Verve Poetry Press.

Oakley is an alum of Roundhouse Poetry Collective and The London Library Emerging Writer Programme. They are a current member of The Genesis Jewish Book Week Emerging Writers’ Programme and Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective. They are a winner of the ruth weiss Emerging Poet Award 2022. Oakley’s pamphlet is forthcoming with Out-Spoken Press.

Courtney Conrad is an award-winning poet born and raised in Jamaica and currently based in London. Her work delves into the tensions within Caribbean migration, gender-based violence and national politics. Her mentors include Caroline Bird, Rachel Long, Tolu Agbelusi and Cecilia Knapp.

She is currently working on her debut collection.

Cecilia Knapp is a poet, playwright and novelist and the Young People’s Laureate for London 2020/2021. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward prize for best single poem. She is the winner of the 2021 Ruth Rendell award and has been shortlisted for both the Rebecca Swift Women’s prize and the Outspoken poetry prize. Her debut poetry collection Peach Pig was published by Corsair in 2022 and was the Observer’s poetry book of the month for October. Her poems have appeared in The Financial Times, Granta, The White Review, Wasafiri, Popshot, Ambit, Magma and bath magg and anthologised. She curated the anthology Everything is Going to be alright: Poems for When you Really Need Them, published by Trapeze in 2021. Her debut novel Little Boxes is published by The Borough Press (Harper Collins.) Purchase here.

In 2021 she curated and presented the BBC radio 4 documentary Powerlines; poetry of the coast. She also appeared on Poetry Please as a guest in 2021 and has read her poetry on woman’s hour. She has shared her writing extensively at poetry events in the UK and internationally with residencies and readings in Paris, Switzerland and Johannesburg and performances including Reading Festival, Shambala, Latitude and the Cheltenham Literature festival where she was guest curator in 2015. She’s a former resident artist at The Roundhouse and a Ted X speaker.

Commissions include Vogue, The Tate, The BBC, where she made a short poetry film for BBC iplayer and The Guardian. She has written for The Huffington Post, The Independent, Women’s Health and The Stage. She writes a regular column for Mslexia magazine. She was featured in British Vogue as one of the UK’s young writers to watch.

Her theatre pieces Finding Home and Losing the Night both opened to sell out London runs at The Roundhouse before touring the UK. She has written text for large scale theatre productions for Lewisham Borough of Culture 2022 and IOU theatre.

She teaches creative writing in a variety of settings. She was resident poet at Great Ormond Street Hospital for two years and is lead tutor for the Roundhouse’s prestigious poetry collective. She is committing to raising the visibility of poetry and its many benefits. She is an ambassador for the mental health charity CALM.

Ollie O’Neill is a poet and writer from London, currently studying an MA in Writing at The Royal College of Art. She is the former National Youth Slam Champion, a Barbican Young Poet alumni, and has been published in journals such as Magma, Bath Magg, and Fourteen Poems, as well as having read her work at venues such as Soho Theatre, The Royal Festival Hall, and The Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2019 her first pamphlet Ways of Coping was published by Out-Spoken Press, a poetic research project on the pathologisation of women within the realm of psychiatry. Her debut full-length collection What We Are Given was published by Write Bloody UK,  an exploration of horizontal inheritance and lineage through interpersonal relationships. She is concerned with writing outwards from within a particular lens of class, sexuality, and the female experience.

SL Grange is a poet, theatre-maker, artist and researcher of queer history. Recent work includes Difficult Matter, a residency and art exhibition at Triangle, Deptford about shipwright Mary Lacy / William Chandler; Letters of No Moment, a poetry project working with female voices in The National Archives sixteenth and seventeenth century High Court of Admiralty records; We Elizabethans, a collaboration with E.M. Parry on board ONCA Barge for Brighton Fringe; and A Note to Mary Frith, commissioned by Shakespeare’s Globe for Notes to the Forgotten She-Wolves.
SL Grange won the 2021 Poetry Wales pamphlet competition and the resulting pamphlet Bodies and Other Haunted Houses is out now from Seren Books.

Carinya Sharples is a writer, facilitator and occasional library assistant from Lewisham. Her creative writing has been published by The London Reader, The Guyana Annual, Commonwealth Writers’ adda and was selected by Kendal Mountain Literature Festival as part of its Open Mountain showcase in 2021. She was also shortlisted for Rebel Women Lit’s Caribbean Reader’s Awards 2020 (Non-Fiction Individual Pieces) and Flipside Festival’s GAWP! Green Alphabet Writing Prize 2017, and longlisted for Mslexia’s Short Story Competition 2021. In 2020, she completed an MA in Creative Writing & Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-edited the book ‘Inspire: Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing’. She previously worked as a freelance journalist for BBC World Service, The Pavement, Gal-Dem and many others.

Laura Barker is a writer, artist, and facilitator, and she runs a queer black writing group in London, UK. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Apparition Lit, midnight & indigo, The Other Stories, Planet Scumm, and Middleground, and she was a lead writer for Spread The Word’s This Is Our Place project. Her YA novel Picnics was shortlisted for the Faber Andlyn BAME (FAB) Prize. Her favourite crisps are Ready Salted. Follow her at @LauraHannahBar.

LiLi K. Bright is a writer, nature guide, facilitator, coach, tree nerd/witch, and amateur birder. Obsessed with city nature, they write ecopoetry, climate fiction, and weird short stories about birds and trees. You can find LiLi wandering green spaces in cities, online at cherrytreewalk.com and @cherrytree_walk on Instagram & Twitter.

Véronique Belinga (she/they/vee) is a cultural worker and audio storyteller based in London. Véronique works across different mediums including sound, podcasting and radio to explore Black life as it relates to (self)identity, cultural production and its expression. Vee’s research practice is informed by her understanding of history as a radical tool for political education, creative thinking and imagination.

My name is Dr Monika Singh Gangotra and I am of South Asian Punjabi heritage. I graduated with a PhD in psychology in 2015 after giving birth to my daughter. Following this, I decided I wanted to take my journey on a different path. One that allowed me to express myself more creatively. I began working in the fashion industry with a soon-to-be-launched clothing label and after falling pregnant with my son in 2020 I decided to submit my children’s book transcripts for publishing during lockdown. 2021 saw me nursing a baby and the publication of my first book, Sunflower Sisters. And I am very excited to announce that the second book in the Sunflower Sisters series, The Gifts That Grow, was published in July 2022. Also, you can catch me on The Big Family Cooking Showdown streaming on Netflix.

Annemarie Anang is an actress, musician and former primary school teacher. She began writing for children after struggling to find books for her daughter that featured main characters who reflected the diversity of children in our world. She campaigns for better mental health and well-being in early years. A Londoner, born to Ghanaian parents, she lives in Sweden with her young daughter and husband.

Ebinehita Iyere is the founder of Milk Honey Bees – a creative and expressive safe space for young Black women and girls to put H.E.R (Healing, Empowerment and Resilience) first. It’s more than just an organ isation: it’s a sisterhood, a family. Their essay collection Girlhood Unfiltered, reflecting on the multifaceted experience of Black girlhood, is out now. Ebinehita is a passionate public speaker, mentor and advocate for young people across London. She works as a Therapeutic Youth Practitioner, supporting the emotional needs of young people in the community, especially those affected by the education and youth justice system. She is currently completing her PhD on the complexities and flaws in the education system as per the experiences of Black teenagers.

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of: The Midnight Run (an arts-filled, night-time, urban walking experience), The Rhythm and Poetry Party (The R.A.P Party) which celebrates poetry & hip hop, and Poetry + Film / Hack (P+F/H) which celebrates Poetry and Film. Identity, Displacement & Destiny are recurring themes in his work, where he tries to mix the old with the new: traditional African oral storytelling with contemporary poetics, paint with pixel, texture with vector. His books are published by Flipped Eye, Akashic, Nine Arches, Penned In The Margins, Oberon & Methuen.

Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in Deptford. Her collection Shine, Darling (Offord Road Books) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She’s had work published in The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Telegraph among others. Ella has been poet in residence for Tate Britain, the National Trust, Back from the Brink, Royal Holloway University physics department where she was writing about the Cassini Spacecraft, and The John Hansard Gallery. Her poems about the St Ives Modernists are currently on show at Tate St Ives.

Photo of Ella by Etienne Gilfillan

Jamie Hale is a poet, screenwriter and essayist fascinated by the intimate connections between language, the mortal body, and nature. Their pamphlet, Shield, was published by Verve in Jan 2021, and their 2019 poetry and theatre show, NOT DYING, featured at the Barbican Centre, with which Jamie won Director/Theatremaker of the Year in the Future Theatre Fund awards. Jamie runs CRIPtic Arts, an arts development organisation focusing on d/Deaf and disabled creatives

Leone Ross is a writer, editor and academic. She was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All The Blood Is Red, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and her second novel, Orange Laughter, was named by Wasafiri magazine as one of the most influential British novels of the last 25 years. Ross’s first short story collection, Come Let Us Sing Anyway (Peepal Tree), was shortlisted for the V.S.Pritchett Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Edge Hill Prize 2018. She is a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.

Her third novel This One Sky Day is published by Faber in the UK and FSG in the US. It was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2021.

Sara Jafari is a British-Iranian author and editor. She is a contributor of the essay collection “I Will Not Be Erased”: Our stories about growing up as people of colour (Walker Books, 2019), and Who’s Loving You (Trapeze, 2021). She also single-handedly runs TOKEN Magazine, a literary and arts print magazine featuring under-represented writers and artists, as well as working in children’s book publishing. Her debut novel The Mismatch was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.

Caleb Azumah Nelson is a 27-year-old British-Ghanaian writer and photographer living in South East London. His photography was shortlisted for the Palm Photo Prize and won the People’s Choice prize. His short story PRAY is shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2020. OPEN WATER is his first novel.

Photo of Caleb by Stuart Simpson @ Penguin Books

Carinya Sharples is a freelance writer, teacher, journalist and editor, situated somewhere between the UK and Guyana. She recently graduated from a Masters in Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths, University of London.

She is currently working as a workshop facilitator with We Speak and Refugee Youth’s Amazing People of the World project.

Her creative writing has been published in The London Reader, Commonwealth Writers’ ADDA Stories and was shortlisted for the Flipside Festival’s 2017 Green Alphabet Writing Prize and Rebel Women Lit’s Caribbean Readers’ Award (Non Fiction – Individual Pieces) 2020.

As a journalist, she has produced articles, radio packages and online content for many different platforms, including BBC World Service, Mongabay, Gal-Dem, Private Eye, The Guardian, and The Pavement. I have also also taught communications at the University of Guyana as a part-time lecturer, and been part of Peabody and BAFTA Award winning teams.

Laila’s poetry uses imagery and lyricism to tell stories about identity and human rights. She studied English literature at the University of St Andrews and Human Rights at the University of London. She is a member of the Keats House Poetry Forum, a collective of London based poets supported by Keats House in Hampstead who work on poetry projects.  She co-edited ‘In Protest- 150 poems for human rights’, a unique anthology of global poetry collated by the Keats House Poets and the University of London’s Human Rights Consortium.

Laila performs her poetry and organises events and workshops at universities, festivals, heritage sites and various NGOs- using poetry and the arts to campaign for human rights and bring people together. She is putting together her first pamphlet and has been documenting the memories of war survivors in Bosnia, as well as working on poems that explore refugee and indigenous rights.

Anna Sayburn Lane is a novelist, short story writer and journalist. Her mystery thriller novels explore the rich literary landscapes of London and Kent. Anna studied English and History at university. She began her career as a reporter on a south London newspaper, later moving into medical journalism. She published her first novel, Unlawful Things, in 2018. The novel investigates the mystery surrounding the death in Deptford of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, woven into a contemporary thriller. Unlawful Things was shortlisted for the Virago New Crime Writer award and picked as a Crime in the Spotlight choice by the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival. Her second book, The Peacock Room, takes inspiration from the London poet and artist William Blake, while the third, The Crimson Thread, is a return to Christopher Marlowe and is set in Canterbury, the city of his birth. All three novels feature her literary sleuth Helen Oddfellow, a walking tour guide and academic, who lives in Deptford. Anna lives between south London and the Kent coast. Find out more at www.annasayburnlane.com.

Laura Barker is a writer, artist, and facilitator, and she runs a queer black writing group in London, UK. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Apparition Lit, midnight & indigo, The Other Stories, Planet Scumm, and Middleground, and she was a lead writer for Spread The Word’s This Is Our Place project. Her YA novel Picnics was shortlisted for the Faber Andlyn BAME (FAB) Prize. Her favourite crisps are Ready Salted. Follow her at @LauraHannahBar.

Writer, poet, speaker and BBC radio presenter, Salma El-Wardany performs internationally, has given 2 TEDx Talks, worked with Edinburgh University on the Dangerous Woman project, as well as partnering with The British Library and The Wellcome Collection. She’s half Egyptian, half Irish and part Desi, regularly working with global brands to raise awareness through poetry and conversation. She’s part of the award-winning bestseller It’s Not About the Burqa and is currently publishing her debut novel in June 2022 with Trapeze in the UK, and Grand Central in the US.

Denzell Dankwah is a British-born Ghanaian, based in Northampton. In 2021, he graduated from the University of Gloucestershire where he was studying Illustration (BA Hons). Comic books and graphic novels influence Denzell’s art heavily and his love for the medium that encouraged him to start drawing at an early age. Superheroes is his first book.

Flavia Z. Drago was born and raised in Mexico City. As a child, she wanted to be a mermaid. When that didn’t happen, she began her career as a graphic designer and a children’s book illustrator. She has an MA in Children’s Book Illustration from Cambridge School of Art and was shortlisted for the Sebastian Walker Award. She lives between the UK and Mexico. Find her online at flaviazdrago.com, on Twitter as @Diafla and on Instagram as @flavia_zdrago.

Zanib Mian’s books have featured on BBC’s Cbeebies Bedtime Stories and The Guardian for their contribution to diversity in children’s literature. Zanib studied Molecular Cell Biology at University College London and went on to teach Science in secondary schools before she made the decision to give up the career to create change within children’s publishing. She felt that diverse characters from all minorities and backgrounds weren’t being fully represented in books for young children. She launched Sweet Apple Publishers with a clear commitment to publishing inclusive books, many of which she has authored herself. She regularly features in the Bradford Literature Festival, was commissioned to write an opera for The Mahogany Opera Group, and is also on the panel of judges for the prestigious Young Muslim Writers Awards.

Laura Henry-Allain MBE is an award-winning international writer, speaker, producer and consultant. She is the creator of the well-loved JoJo and Gran Gran series, developed by CBeebies and is the series’ associate producer. She is also executive producer on a few shows that are currently in development.
Her new bestselling children’s book, My Skin, Your Skin, illustrated by Onyinye Iwu, explores race and racism, and empowers children to be the best versions of themselves.

Onyinye Iwu is a children’s book illustrator, author and former secondary school teacher. She has illustrated the chapter book series “Too Small Tola” written by Atinuke and is one of the brilliant illustrators on Anothologies such as Hey You!, Happy Here and Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. Onyinye is passionate about literature, culture and history, she is currently working on a number of picturebooks as an illustrator and her debut work as an author.
My Skin Your Skin, written by Laura Henry-Allain MBE is her debut picture book.

Rees Nicolas was born and raised in south London. He has been involved in anti-police and anti-border organising for the past decade. His writing is concerned with working-class knowledge production and radical education. He translates from Italian and writes the occasional essay. His translation of Romano Alquati’s Per Fare Conricerca is forthcoming with Notes from Below.

Round Table Books is the only children’s bookshop in Brixton. It officially opened its doors in June 2018 after successfully running two pop up shops and crowdfunding £50,000 to do so. It stocks inclusive titles from underrepresented authors and illustrators for the ages of 0-18 and regularly holds events both in the store and wider community.

Entelechy Arts is a charity based in Lewisham, South East London. They produce vibrant and important cultural programmes which powerfully test the boundaries between art, creativity, care, wellbeing and community. Their work is created by and for the communities they work with, namely isolated older people, those living with profound and multiple disabilities, and those living in care home environments; enabling them to play an active and visible role in the creative life of their community. They work with a pioneering and diverse range of artists across all art forms, who collaborate with our communities to meet, celebrate, and experience each other and the world.

Deptford Lounge is an award-winning community hub with a range of services and facilities available for all to use.

The Friends of Brookmill Park are a group of local residents who wish to promote the park, share knowledge about its amazing wildlife, enhance planting and biodiversity.  It is a small park but highly valued by local residents and all those who walk or cycle through it.  Regardless of whether you spend time on a hot day enjoying the river and gardens or whether you cycle or walk through the park on the way to school, college, work or shopping in Lewisham or Deptford,  we wish to make your time with us a life enhancing experience.   The cycle park is part of the waterlink network and part of national cycle paths.  The Stephen Lawrence Centre is at the northern end of park.