Amani Saeed is an international writer who treads the line between roots and routes. She writes poetry, blog posts, films, and whatever else is needed to get the point across. Amani is the curator and host of of the interdisciplinary sell-out night the hen-nah party, designed by and for queer South Asians. Her poetry collection, Split, was published with Burning Eye Books. Amani is the co-writer for Queer Parivaar, which premiered at the BFI Flare 2022 and won Best in British at the Iris Prize 2022. 

Beth Phillips is a Birmingham based poet focused on the confessional form. A graduate of BA (Hons) in Creative Writing, and MA Arts Management, her work explores community, family and grief.  She has previously founded a multidisciplinary magazine, showcasing the voices of emerging artists.

Bluey Little (she/they) is a writer hailing from Glasgow via Leeds. They developed long covid in the summer of 2022 — this is their first work produced since diagnosis. Prior work includes poems published in The Lickety Split, The Selkie, Daughterhood, -algia, Bathed in Concrete, and BRENDA; and dramatic works such as Bodice Ripper (work in progress) (Playwrights’ Studio Scotland), 2020 Stories: The View From Here (Scottish Youth Theatre), and Kith (Traverse Young Writers).

Geraint Ellis is a Barbican Young Poet and former Scottish National Slam Poetry Finalist. He has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize, Bridport Prize, Aurora Prize and Hexham Poetry Competition, and twice long-listed for the National Poetry Competition. His work is published by flipped eye publishing, Broken Sleep Books, Abridged and more. He has written extensively for BBC Radio Comedy.

Henry Stone is a performance poet from South London. His work touches on social commentary including racism, mental illness and being a millennial Londoner. He's been featured in the Evening Standard as a "British Trailblazer" with support from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. He has worked alongside brands such as HSBC, the Barbican and the Royal Albert Hall.

Ishita Uppadhayay is a writer and policy professional from India based in London. Their poetry has been featured in Phi Mag, the87pres, and STRAND Mag. They can be found at @ishitaupp.

Jess Rahman-González (they/them) is a writer and performer working across poetry, theatre, and live art. Their work currently focuses on their experiences of being on inpatient eating disorder wards.  

Previously, Jess has been a Barbican Open Labs artist and Starting Blocks resident artist at Camden People’s Theatre. They have also been part of Roundhouse Poetry Collective, Soho Theatre's Writers' Lab and Royal Court's playwriting group. 

Katie O’Pray is a creative facilitator, based in Bedford. They have been the winner of the ruth weiss Foundation’s Emerging Poet’s Prize and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. Their work has also earned recognition in the National Poetry Competition, the Manchester Writing Competition and the Magma Poetry Competition, among others. Their ‘devastating’ debut collection ‘APRICOT’ was published by Out-Spoken Press in 2022.

Kerrica Kendall is an actor, writer, and aspiring director.

Kiara (KiKi) Gilbert is a poet who grapples with the afterlives of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Originally from the US South, she’s interested in Black girlhood, abolitionist futures, and hood feminism. Alongside poetry, she is a scholar-activist, having published with Oxford University Press and currently working as a community organiser in Brixton.

Lucas Sheridan is a queer student and poet based whose writing deals with gender, queerness, the natural world, and health. He is a Nine Arches Press Dynamo Mentee, Barbican Young Poet, and Unislam 2023 winner. His poetry has been published in Queerlings, Eponym, and Inkwell and won a Young Poets’ Network Challenge. You can find them in gardens on cold mornings with a cup of tea, at your local open mic night, or in kitchens at parties telling their friends to join a union.

Maeve is a Femme dyke from South London with a love for poetic balm-making. She is a Barbican Young Poet alum, with two poems in flipped eye’s 2022 anthology: ‘Articulations for Keeping the Light In’. She was longlisted for Culture Recordings’ New Voice in Poetry Prize 2020. Maeve collects seeds, grows flowers and makes her own skincare products from infused oils. She has run creative workshops for young people in and leaving the care system across London and is a community organiser for The Equality Trust. You can find her on Instagram: @maeve_slattery_ 

Marianne is a queer poet from Peterborough, currently residing in North London. She is the founder/producer of Thoughtcast Collective, which organises multidisciplinary art shows at St. Margaret’s House. Her work has been highly commended for the Outspoken Page Poetry Prize, and she has been longlisted for the same prize twice. She has been published by LADA, Enthusiastic Press, and long-listed for Butcher’s Dog. Additionally, she has upcoming anthology publications with Flipped Eye and Off The Chest Anthology. Her work explores themes such as the movements/refusals of time and memory through the systems and cycles of capitalism, grounded in the body and desire. Her poetry applies the logic of cartoon-time and chaos.

Nathalia Samhil Gonzalez Gutierrez is a Venezuelan, London-based poet and feminist community organiser; raised across four continents, her writing explores displacement, collective grief, and its role in socio political change. She’s a co-founder of Tangled Tongues / Lenguas Enredadas - a Spanglish writing group whose eponymous zine is currently in the National Poetry Library’s collection. She is also the Alastair Mcbain Scholar for International Human Rights Law at Oxford University, where she has been researching transitional justice and economic violence. She’ll be spending the next few months working with civil society organisations in Venezuela and Colombia.

Noah Jacob is an Arab-British poet, performer and critic based in London. Her writing often explores boundaries between human and unhuman, interrogating the poetry within biology, automaton and nature, particularly the ocean. 

She is an alum of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective 2021/22, having placed second in the Roundhouse Poetry Slam 2021. She is an editor and co-writes a column on diaspora poetry for Zindabad Zine. She is also an alum of Apples and Snakes ‘The Writing Room’ and T.S. Eliot Prize Young Critics. Her work has been featured by the National Poetry Library, Shubbak, Camden Inspire and Peckham Festivals, and published in orangepeel, Hecate, and Kalopsia mags. 

Noah is currently working on a poetry-music E.P., exploring themes of heritage and intergenerational relationships, nature and mythology and religion. In Summer 2024, she will be featured at The Last Word Festival and 05Fest: Redacted.  

Nomakhwezi Becker is a London based, South African-German interdisciplinary artist creating through theatre and poetry performance, storytelling and the written form. Her practice listens and responds to the call of collaborative distant intimacy, finding, reclaiming, and creating home in the in-between spaces as a woman raised by multiple homes, heritages and languages. Through her work she hopes to create worlds that hold space for dialogue around claiming our ‘in-betweenity’ as citizens of the world, rather than fearing it. 

Having taken her first steps on stage, she likes to believe it was a sign that this would be her home. Trained as a theatre actress, she has since expanded to film acting and as an interdisciplinary writer and performer. She was awarded an Ovation Fringe-Award at National Arts festival (RSA, 2019) for a collaborative theatre piece based on her trans-continental upbringing called When Coasts Meet and her second play Waiting for Lift Off is being published with the University of Johannesburg. Becker’s poetry has led her to platforms such as Poetry Africa (RSA), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (US), Funda Fest (US), Translationale Berlin (DE) and she is a 2023/24 Barbican Young Poet (UK). She has most recently completed her MA in Performance Making, an interdisciplinary practice-based research course at Goldsmiths University of London.    

 Instagram - @nomakhwezibecker 

Oli Isaac is a London-based playwright and poet, who likes to write tender poems about their tender thoughts. They are interested in how language can fail us, and how experiments in poetry and multimedia can attempt to cross that gap.  

Oli is a recipient of Audible Theatre’s Emerging Playwrights Fund and most recently the winner of the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Competition. They are alumni of Soho Theatre Writers’ Lab, Roundhouse Poetry Collective and the Apples & Snakes’ Writing Room, as well as a current member of Barbican Young Poets.

Rachel Lewis is a poet and creative facilitator interested in hidden pain, everyday joy and love beyond romance. Her first pamphlet, ‘Three degrees of separation’, was published by Wordsmith HQ after winning the Wordsmith Prize. Individual poems have been published by bath magg, Under the Radar, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and the Poetry Society, among others. She is a recipient of the 2022 Jewish Book Week Emerging Writers Award and co-founder of Disabled Joy: the Writing Happiness Project. She can be found at @rachel_lewis_poet on Instagram and twitter.

Shyamli is a writer based in London. In the day (and night!) she works in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and recently began writing as a way to make sense of her incongruence with the world around her. Prior to finance, Shyamli worked across the public, private and non-profit sector in Asia, Europe and the US: writing at The Economist, studying Southeast Asian economies, and leading various activism efforts across politics, public health, and social work. She studied at Harvard Business School and the University of Oxford, and has been writing over the last few years to rediscover her authenticity, identity and creativity after many years on a path where she lost sight of it. She currently posts her writing on Substack, TikTok and Instagram under the pseudonym badgersett.

Vera K Yuen is a poet and writer born and raised in Hong Kong. Her work is featured or forthcoming on PN Review, The Lumiere Review and elsewhere. Previously, she was the winner of the Charles Causley International Poetry Competition 2022 and was highly commended in the Disabled Poets Prize 2024. She is a current Barbican Young Poet and a keen mental health advocate.

Zad is a writer and community organiser from London. They were one of the winners of the 2019 Spread the Word London Writers Awards, and have written on migration, feminism and colonialism for VICE, Red Pepper, The Vision and AZ-magazine. They have written theatre shows preserving oral family histories of war for the Camden People’s Theatre and the North Wall. They were commissioned by Poet in the City and their poetry was published in Bad Betty Press’ Field Notes on Survival and the other side of hope. They are currently writing their first novel, an extract from which won the Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award 2022. They hope to see the end of capitalism in their lifetime.