I was born in the Midlands in the early 1980s to dual heritage parents. When my father met my mother in the 70s she already had four children from an earlier marriage and together, they had my sister and me, the first people of colour in our family.

My family cherished books and the arts but had very little else. We grew up in a predominantly white council estate, and despite my father not living with us (their relationship did not outlive my mother’s pregnancy, though he remained a prominent figure in my life), hostility towards us was constant and unrelenting. Bricks through windows, threats, physical attacks: all regular occurrences. The National Front often loomed on our doorstep, their presence a menacing reminder that we were not welcome.

As a child of colour in a mostly white family, this hostility felt deeply personal - even though it took years for me to articulate this. I grew up ashamed of my skin, unable to understand why it set me apart. Books became my refuge, finding solace in the pages of Narnia, the adventures of Mrs. Pepperpot, or the magical lands above The FarawayTree. Yet even in these beloved worlds, I found no one who looked like me. I loved those stories, but they subtly reinforced the notion that I didn’t belong.

In my teens, I walked a wayward path. I left home at sixteen, failing all my exams, and spent the following years drifting between jobs. After the birth of my second child, I found myself back in my mother’s box room in the same council house I’d grown up in, feeling lost. Determined to rewrite my story, I convinced a friend to accompany me to the local university’s open day. But reality hit when they told me, “You can’t enroll; you don’t have any GCSEs!!” Undeterred, I enrolled at the local college instead and at twenty-seven, I earned my first GCSE. Eventually I achieved a degree in literature, and a Master’s in Creative Writing.

I have never considered myself to be academic. I cannot discuss at length any great literary theorists or tell you exactly where I should be putting my ‘fronted adverbials’ (or even what one is), and I must have spell check on 100% of the time, but I do know what it feels like to be punched in the gut by a story. That is what great literature is: something you feel. Something that grabs you, makes you cry, makes you laugh; holds you hostage in the dying light as you get one more page, one last hit. But even as I embraced literature, poetry remained a distant and intimidating art form. I studied it because I had to, but I never felt I truly understood it.

Everything changed when I began working for The Reader, a nonprofit organization that uses Shared Reading to connect people through literature. My role took me into prisons and probation settings across the UK. At first, I introduced poetry into these sessions simply because it was part of the job. But something remarkable happened. Reading poetry with the men and women in prisons brought it to life in a way university never could. These residents, often overlooked and forgotten by society, taught me how to find meaning in poems that had once seemed inaccessible. They brought passion and insight in ways I hadn’t imagined. Through their raw, unguarded responses, I began to understand poetry as a deeply human art - an expression of pain and love; longing and having; of struggle and hope. Today, I write for those who, like me, have felt unseen and unheard. Poetry became my voice because others, unexpectedly and graciously, helped me find it.

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