Contributors and Supporters

Sandra A. Agard has been a Professional Storyteller, Writer, Cultural Historian and Literature Consultant for over forty years. She has performed at venues across the UK and internationally. She has written numerous plays and has had work published in a variety of collections and anthologies like Time for Telling ed. by Mary Medlicott and Unheard Voices ed. by Malorie Blackman.

Sandra was the Literature Development Officer for Southwark and Lewisham Libraries for eighteen years. In 2016, Sandra was the Centenary Storyteller for the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Sandra published her first children’s book called Trailblazers: Harriet Tubman-The Journey to Freedom in 2019. Sandra co-edited with Laila Sumpton the book Where We Find Ourselves –a collection of poems and stories. Sandra has recently performed in the play Passing On, a collection of monologues and duologues at the Roundhouse in London. In 2022 Sandra will be publishing four books for children on Black History. Sandra is currently a Learning Facilitator for Schools at the British Library.

Joanna Brown is a writer, researcher and educator, working with a focus on Black British lives and histories.

She is currently reading for a PhD in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London and is a British Library Eccles Centre Research Fellow. Her short memoir, Birds can be heard singing through open windows, was Highly Commended in the 2020 Spread the Word Life Writing competition.

Joanna trained to teach at the Institute of Education and worked for several years as a primary school teacher in Haringey. Her recent work for schools includes the Africa Writes poetry development programme. At the British Library, she has led school workshops and CPD sessions, exploring the Library’s collections with pupils and teachers to spark curiosity and inspire creative writing.

Joanna writes for children under the name JT Williams. Her debut novel, The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries, spotlighting Black British lives in Georgian London, will be published by Farshore Books in June 2022.

Keith Jarrett’s writing and research spans poetry, fiction and the essay form to interrogate Black British and Caribbean history, religion and sexuality.

Keith is an international poetry slam champion and was selected for the International Literature Showcase as one of 10 outstanding LGBT writers in the UK. Selah, his debut poetry collection, was published in 2017. His play, Safest Spot in Town, was performed at London’s Old Vic and filmed for BBC Four, and his poem ‘From the Log Book’, was projected onto the façade of St Paul’s Cathedral as a commemorative art installation. He has been commissioned for written and performed work at the Royal Festival Hall, Madrid’s Matadero and Centro Azkuna in Bilbao, both in English and Spanish. Keith is currently the poet-in-residence at Imperial Healthcare Trust and teaches Creative Writing at NYU London. He also supervises on the MFA programme at Birkbeck University, where he completed his PhD.

Nick Makoha is the founder of The Obsidian Foundation.Winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz prize and the Poetry London Prize. In 2017, Nick’s debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year. Nick is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and the Complete Works alumnus. He won the 2015 Brunel International AfricanPoetry Prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. His play The Dark—produced by Fuel Theatre and directed by JMK awardwinner Roy Alexander—was on a national tour in 2019. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Alfred Fagon Award and won the 2021 Columbia International Play Reading prize. His poems have appeared in the Cambridge Review, the New York Times, Poetry Review, 'e Rialto, Poetry London, TriQuarterly Review, 5 Dials, Boston Review, Callaloo and Wasaari. He is a Trustee for the Arvon Foundation and the Ministry of Stories, and a member of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen collective. https://nickmakoha.com

Miriam Nash is a poet, performer and educator. Her collection of poems All the Prayers in the House (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) won a Somerset Maugham Award (2018) and an Eric Gregory Award (2015) from the Society of Authors. Her latest book, The Nine Mothers of Heimdallr (Hercules Editions, 2020) is a matriarchal re-telling of the Norse creation myth. She works as a school librarian in northern Italy.

Victoria de Rijke is Professor in Arts & Education and Director of the Centre for Education Research and Schoarship (CERS) at Middlesex University in London, where she has worked for interdisciplinary, anti-racist and equal opportunities education for over 30 years. Her research and publication is transdisciplinary across the fields of literature and the arts, children’s literature and play, through the associations of metaphor. Publications include Art & Soul: Rudolf Steiner, Interdisciplinary Art and Education (2019). Current research is on aspects of Art, Play and Identity, eg. with Santiago University, Chile for research and knowledge exchange in Bio-sociocultural Inclusion: Challenging Homogeneity in Schools.

Laila Sumpton is a poet, editor, performer and educator who works with schools, hospitals, museums, galleries and charities on a wide variety of poetry projects. She manages the Arts Council funded initiative Poetry Vs Colonialism- where poets work with museums, academics and schools to explore the British empire and its legacy. She was recently the Keats House Poet in residence and has co - edited 'Where We Find Ourselves' an anthology from Global Majority writers published by Arachne Press. Laila has been commissioned by Tate Modern, the Tower of London and the Royal Free Hospital amongst others and published in numerous anthologies and magazines including Ambit and Modern Poetry in Translation.

Dr Pen Woods is Lecturer in Early Modern Drama at Newcastle University. Her research, in collaboration with arts organisations in the UK and Australia, has focused on the flip-side of current and historical performance: how performance is received and what it does to and for audiences. As well as a historian of performance, audience and spectatorship, Woods is a cultural theorist of affect and a historian of the emotions, with a particular focus on how emotions produce the social and cultural scripts we live by and how we can intervene in these. She has two books in preparation, On Audience with Duke University Press and Guilt Creatures: Global Audiences for Hamlet with Palgrave Macmillan.

We would also like to thank our collaborators- without whose support this project would not have been possible.

Arts Council England, Culture Mile London, Museum of London, Middlesex University, Newcastle University, Queen Mary University of London and the Being Human Festival

The schools and organisations we have run workshops with:

Dulwich College, London Academy of Excellence Tottenham, Parliament Hill School, Middlesex University- Teacher Trainees, Highgate School, Freedom From Torture Write to Life group and Scottish BPOC Writers Network.

The organisations, artists and academics who inspired and advised our poets:

Cotton - The Muslin Trust, Keats House, Season of Bangla Drama, Dr Lipi Begum, historian Sonia Ashmore, dancer and composer Archita Kumar.

Gold - Eleni Bide (Goldsmiths Company), Angus Patterson (Senior Curator of Metalwork V&A Museum) and jeweller and goldsmith Emefa Cole.

Tobacco - Professor Nicholas Ridout (Queen Mary University of London).

Sugar - artist Karen McLean and Dr Malcolm Cocks (St Pauls School and formerly Dulwich College).

IMAGE CREDITS

Gold, page 6 Ring (Vulcan Series), Oxidised silver and gold leaf, Designed and made by Emefa Cole England 2012, H: 42.5 mm, Diam: 37.5 mm, London Museum no. M.13-2020, Reproduced courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Tobacco, page 19 Flowering Tobacco near Berlin, Connecticut, Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

Sugar, page 34 Sweet Capitalism, a manilla made of sugar by artist Karen McLean, 2020.

Cotton, page 48 A scarf which belonged to Fanny Brawne- who was engaged to the poet John Keats, 18—, Cloth, K/AR/01/037, Image used with permission of Keats House, City of London Corporation.

Four Colonialist Pantoums and a Song, page 59 Painting, portrait of East India Company official, by Dip Chand, opaque watercolour on paper, Murshidabad or Patna, ca. 1760-1764, Reproduced courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Afterword, page 66 Tortoiseshell and ivory tea caddy and spoon which belonged to Charles Brown. 18—, K/AR/01/146, Image used with permission of Keats House Museum, City of London Corporation.

an anthology

Poetry Vs Colonialism brings together poets, academics, schools and museums to investigate our colonial histories via items traded in the empire- cotton, tobacco, gold and sugar. This anthology brings together new poetry on these topics by Laila Sumpton, Nick Makoha, Sandra A Agard and Keith Jarrett alongside the students they have worked with.