Women, Black Arts, and Brixton in the 1980s

Born in Manchester to a British mother and Nigerian father, SuAndi became a performance poet in 1985. She has made several recordings of her work and published four collections of poetry: Style (1990), Nearly Forty (1994), There Will Be No More Tears (1996), and I Love the Blackness of My People (2003). Her poems have been widely anthologized, and she has also written two librettos: The Calling (2005) and The Libretto of Mary Seacole, published in Hidden Gems, Volume II, edited by Deirdre Osborne (2012). She is the freelance Cultural Director of the Black Arts Alliance and Honorary Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Leicester, UK.1 In 1999, SuAndi was awarded an OBE for her services to literature. In 2015, she received an honorary doctorate from Lancaster University for her outstanding contribution to British art. Dorothea Smartt is a literary activist, live artist, and a nationally and internationally respected poet of Barbadian heritage, who lives in South London. She has been Poet in Residence in Brixton Market and an Attached Live Artist at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. She is Associate Poetry Editor for Sable: The Lit Mag for New Writing and codirects Inscribe, an Arts Council-funded development program for writers of African and Asian descent.2 She has taught Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the University of Leeds, and was a Visiting Writer at Florida International University. She has published two full collections of poetry: Connecting Medium (2001) and Ship Shape (2008), and a chapbook, Reader, I Married Him and Other Queer Goings On (2014). Her poems are included in several anthologies, including The Forward Book of Poetry (2002), IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2002), and Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets (2012).3

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