Kathleen Jamie (born 1962)

As well as poetry, Kathleen has written three non-fiction books: Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing. Her influences and passions include travel, the natural world, art, medicine and archaeology. She reviews for publications including the Guardian and has also written for radio. Since 2010, she has held a part-time post as Professor of Poetry at the University of Stirling. A poem of Kathleen’s was recently selected by the public to be carved on to the national monument at Bannockburn, Scotland.

Lochan is here.

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966)

Georgia’s parents were of African-American, Native American and English heritage. She was born in Atlanta in her namesake state but moved to New York with her husband and two sons. Her husband didn’t encourage her writing but, after his death, her career took off and her home became known as the S Street Salon, a magnet for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Anne Spencer and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. She wrote almost thirty plays, including several exposing the evils of racial prejudice, though many remained unpublished during her lifetime due to both her race and her gender. Although she often had to take clerical jobs to support the family, she produced around two hundred poems as well as newspaper columns and over thirty short stories.

Your World is here.

Meena Kandasamy (born 1984)

Meena combines her love for the written word with the struggle for social justice through poetry, translation, fiction and essays. She has published the poetry collections Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010) and published novels including the highly acclaimed When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer As A Young Wife (2017), which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). She is also an award-winning translator and non-fiction writer. Meena holds a PhD in sociolinguistics and her work has appeared in eighteen languages. She lives in London. Sangharsh Karna Hai is here.

Jackie Kay (born 1961)

As well as poetry, Jackie has written plays, children’s books and television dramas. She has won awards including the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award (for The Adoption Papers), the Somerset Maugham Award (for Other Lovers) and the Guardian Fiction Prize (for Trumpet.) Jackie was the third modern Makar (the Scottish Laureate.) She was awarded an MBE in 2006 and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and Cultural Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University.

The Moon at Knowle Hill is here.

Anna Kisby

Anna Kisby studied Literature and Film at the Universities of East Anglia, Sussex and Paris-Sorbonne, taught English in Prague and sold cowboy boots in Massachusetts, before training as an archivist and working with women’s history collections. Her poems are widely published and her debut pamphlet, All The Naked Daughters, appeared in 2017. She won the BBC Proms Poetry competition 2016, the Havant Poetry Competition 2016, and was commended in the Faber New Poets Scheme 2015–2016.

Saint Senara and Me is here.

Vanessa Kisuule

Vanessa has worked with organizations including RADA and the Southbank Centre, and been featured on BBC Radio 4, The Guilty Feminist podcast, Blue Peter, Sky TV and in the Guardian and Huffington Post. She has performed at venues including the Royal Albert Hall, the British Library, WOMAD and Glastonbury. She has won more than ten slam titles and represented the UK in two European Slam Championships. Vanessa has published two collections – Joyriding the Storm (2014) and A Recipe for Sorcery (2017) – and her work was highly commended in the Forward Prize Anthology (2019). Her one-woman show SEXY has been on tour, and she is the Bristol City Poet for 2018–2020. In 2020 her poem ‘Hollow’ about the toppling of a statue of slave-trader Edward Colston went viral. holiday is here.