Poetry with a Punch

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. His second collection After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize, along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year.
In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. His poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics was published by Granta in 2022.

Dr Sanah Ahsan is an award-winning poet, clinical psychologist, presenter, and educator. Her work is centred on compassion, troubling our colonial understandings of mental health, and embracing each other’s madness. Her psychological practice is rooted in liberation and community psychology, drawing on therapeutics, poetics, and post-activism as interconnected practices to support racialised and marginalised people. Her published research explores the deconstruction of whiteness within UK clinical psychology. Some of Sanah’s media work includes presenting a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary exploring the over-medicalisation of young people’s distress and giving a TED Talk entitled ‘Rewriting my story with love and poetry as a queer muslim’. Sanah won the Outspoken Poetry Performance Prize and was recently shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and White Review Poetry Prize. Sanah’s poetry has been published in several anthologies.

Malika Booker is a poetry Lecturer at Manchester University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage and the founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. Her first poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3:Your Family: Your Body (2017). A cave Canem Fellow, she won The Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem (2020).

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. A star of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and the Spike Lee movie Inside Man with Denzel Washington, Carlos partnered with John Legend on Senior Orientation, a program to counteract bullying and champion inclusive masculinities. He is the International Book Award-winning author of several books, including the poetry collection Fractures and the memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood.