Joelle Taylor

Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet, playwright and author who has recently completed touring Europe, Australia and South East Asia with her latest collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She is widely anthologised, the author of 3 full poetry collections and 3 plays and is currently completing her debut book of short stories The Night Alphabet, with support from the Arts Council. She has featured on The Verb (R3), Power Lines (R4), Poetry Please (Radio 4) Educating the East End (ITV), and We Belong Here (BBC). She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK’s national youth slam championships, for the Poetry Society in 2001 and was its Artistic Director and National Coach until 2018. Her work is taught as part of the OCR GCSE syllabus, and she has received a Change Maker Award from the Southbank Centre in recognition of the effect SLAMbassadors had on British culture. She has recently been commissioned to develop a new spoken word show to tour throughout 2020 and is the founder and Artistic Director of a new inter-European spoken word project ‘Borderlines’, funded by the Arts Council. She is the host and co-curator of premier London poetry and music club Out-Spoken, currently resident at the Southbank Centre, and a Fellow of the RSA. She was longlisted for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship 2017 and 2019.