How Can Poetry Shape Resistance Movements? Poetry performance

Travis Alabanza is a performer, writer and theatre maker. In the last two years they have been noted by numerous publications, such as ARTSY, ID AND MOBO _AWARDS, as one of the most prominent emerging queer artistic voices, and also listed in OUT as an influential queer figure, appeared in campaigns with MAC X ASOS and performed across the country and internationally. Their unique mixture of performance, poetry, style, political views and risk taking performances has given them a unique placement both nationally and internationally.

Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won over 10 slam titles, was the recipient of The Jerwood Micro Arts Bursary in 2017 to undertake extensive dance training and also received the Leverhulme Arts Scholarship in 2017 from Bristol Old Vic. She has performed at The Royal Albert Hall, The British Library, Blahblahblah at the Bristol Old Vic, Tongue Fu and Chill Pill in London, Shambala, WOMAD, Wilderness, Secret Garden Party and Glastonbury. She has worked with the Southbank Centre, RADA, Knee High Theatre and Warner Music and had her work featured on BBC iPlayer, BBC Radio 1 and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, The Guardian, Huffington Post, The Guilty Feminist Podcast, Gal Dem Magazine, Dazed and Confused, Blue Peter, Sky TV and TEDx in Vienna. She represented the UK in two European Slam Championships in Sweden and Belgium, completed a ten day tour around Germany in 2015 and spoke at the Global Forum of Migration and Development in Bangladesh in 2016. She has also performed in Finland, Barcelona, Oslo and Brazil. Her poetry collections ‘Joyriding The Storm’  and ‘A Recipe For Sorcery’ are both published by Burning Eye and her work was Highly Commended in The Forward Prize Anthology 2019. She was the Bristol City Poet 2018 – 2020.

Image credit: Evan Dawson

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is an educator, writer and poet from Leeds, West Yorkshire. Her work disrupts understandings of history, race, knowledge and power, interrogating the political purpose of narratives about Muslims, migrants, gender and violence. She is less interested in disproving the ‘truth’ of such narratives and more interested in asking what systemic violence they exist to justify. Suhaiymah works to equip herself and others with the tools to resist structural oppression by unlearning the knowledge society and the education system have instilled in us. She does this through facilitating workshops, giving lectures and performing and writing different types of work as well as campaigning and agitating.