Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet, playwright and author whose poetry collections include: Ska Tissue (Mother Foucault Press, 2011), The Woman Who Was Not There (Burning Eye Books, 2014), Songs My Enemy Taught Me (Out-Spoken Press, 2017) and C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021. It also won the Polari Prize 2022 and was a New Statesman, TLS and White Review Book of the Year. Her novel, The Night Alphabet was published by Quercus in 2024. Her new poetry collection, Maryville, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Joelle 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. She is the host of London’s premier night of poetry and music, Out-Spoken, currently resident at the Southbank. As an educator, she has led workshops and residencies in schools, prisons, youth centres, refugee groups, and other settings. Author photo © Adrian Pope for the T. S. Eliot Prize
