When he was awarded an honorary degree in civil law at Newcastle University in 1967, Dr Martin Luther King gave an electrifying extemporaneous address, speaking without notes, in which he said: ‘There are three urgent and indeed great problems that we face today…That is the problem of racism, the problem of poverty and the problem of war.’
As part of a fifty year anniversary and celebration, this anthology gathers poets from both sides of the Atlantic to address the challenges set out by Dr King. It’s a shock to think how little has changed, and that Martin Luther King could well be speaking right here, right now. In the spirit of Dr King and his work as a humanitarian and activist, this anthology brings together poems that offer powerful testimonies to the urgent issues Dr King defines and represents the polyphony of voices that speak in resistance to our continuing problems of racism, poverty and war.
Featuring poems by Claudia Rankine, Grace Nichols, Yusef Komunyakaa, Moniza Alvi, Rita Dove, Daljit Nagra, Imtiaz Dharker, Fred D’Aguiar, Oliver de la Paz, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, John Agard, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, Toi Derricotte, Vahni Capildeo, Carl Phillips, Sarah Howe, Elizabeth Alexander, Ishion Hutchinson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Marilyn Nelson, Mimi Khalvati, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Pinsky, Bernardine Evaristo, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Major Jackson, Tim Seibles, Choman Hardi, Benjamin Zephaniah, Shazea Quraishi, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sandeep Parmar, Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Rae Paris, Kendel Hippolyte, Amali Rodrigo, Zaffar Kunial, Rishi Dastidar, Raymond Antrobus, Mai Der Vang, Martín Espada, Inua Ellams, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Gregory Pardlo, Edward Doegar, Degna Stone, MacDonald Dixon, Ada Limon, Philip Metres, Nick Makoha, Nathalie Handal, Lauren K Alleyne, Kevin Bowen, Bashabi Fraser, Satchid Anandan.
Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series: 17
Jackie Kay was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. In 2007 Bloodaxe published Darling: New & Selected Poems, which included almost all of her four previous books of poetry from Bloodaxe, The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998) and Life Mask (2005). Her epic poem The Lamplighter, adapted for both radio and stage, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008, was followed by Fiere from Picador in 2011. Her latest poetry title is a pamphlet, The Empathetic Store (Mariscat Press, 2015).
Jackie Kay's fiction and non-fiction (from Picador) has been massively popular: her novel Trumpet (1998), three collections of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking? (2002), Wish I Was Here (2006) and Reality, Reality (2012), and her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), which won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. She won the Somerset Maugham Award with Other Lovers, the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, Decibel Writer of the Year for Wish I Was Here and has twice won the Signal Poetry Award for her children’s poetry. Her fourth book of poetry for children, Red Cherry, Red, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. The Adoption Papers is a set text on numerous school and university courses. She lives in Manchester, and was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2006.
She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and co-edited the anthologies Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2012) with James Procter and Gemma Robinson, and The Mighty Stream: Poems in celebration of Martin Luther King (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2017) with Carolyn Forché.
In 2014 she was appointed Chancellor of the University of Salford, and in 2016 she was named as the new Makar, National Poet of Scotland.
