International Women's Day Spotlight on 5 Legendary Black Women Poets
E.M. Ayovunefe and Jessica Fatoye, our Poetry & Fiction Editor and Sub-Editor, profile five Black women whose poetry challenges ideas about race, migration and traditional definitions of what constitutes a “literary” work.
Each of the Black women profiled below writes with a unique and emphatic voice, developed through careful and considered development of their poetic practice. Although writing from different perspectives and to different audiences, they are united in their iconoclasm and disinterest in the “rules” of what it means to write poetry and what it is to be a poet. They drift seamlessly from more conventional, canonical poetic modes into popular culture and back again, bringing the two together with an elegance and panache that identifies this tradition as the future of English-language poetry. From prizes to residencies to professorships, we are optimistic that the institutional recognition received by each of these poets from an industry so often resistant to meaningful change is indicative of a wider sea-change in the mainstream celebration of Black women poets and writers.
Claudia Rankine (b. 1963)
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright, and professor. To date, she has published five volumes of poetry and two plays, but the magic of Rankine’s work lies in her characteristic disregard for the constraints of genre. In 2014’s Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine blurs the distinctions between poetry, photobook, and memoir, alongside meditations on the murder of Trayvon Martin, the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, and Serena Williams’ experience of misogynoir in public life. The result is a searching and incisive portrait of Black life in America, as Rankine unravels the utopian notion that, following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the United States of America entered a “post-racial” chapter of its history. Rankine won a host of awards for Citizen, including the 2014 Los Angeles Time Book Award and 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection. She was made a MacArthur Fellow in 2016 and awarded an illustrious ‘Genius Grant’, the proceeds of which she used to establish The Racial Imaginary Institute, inviting artists to exhibit work focussed on race and the creative imagination. Since 2018, she has served as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.
Recommended reads: Citizen: An American Lyric (2014, Penguin), The White Card: A Play (2019, Graywolf Press)
— E.M. Ayovunefe
Patience Agbabi (b. 1965)
Patience Agbabi is a British poet, performer and workshop facilitator who has published four volumes of poetry. Born in London to Nigerian parents and fostered in a white English family in Wales for much of her teenage years, Agbabi read English at Pembroke College, Oxford, before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University. Dismissing claims that she intends to be ‘deliberately controversial or provocative,’ Agbabi’s work blissfully weds pop culture with more “highbrow” art forms, blurring the customary page-versus-stage distinction that separates spoken word from more conventionally “literary” poetry. In the sonnets from her 2008 volume Bloodshot Monochrome, Janis Joplin, ‘all hippy hair and Class A vintage’ sits comfortably alongside William Wordsworth, while in ‘Comedown’, Agbabi likens an early-morning departure from London nightclub Heaven to mankind’s expulsion from Eden. Never one to shy away from more unorthodox professional opportunities, Agbabi’s career has seen her sit as poet-in-residence in tattoo parlours and Eton College alike. Since 2008, Agbabi has served as a Creative Writing Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and in 2017, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Recommended reads: Bloodshot Monochrome (2008, Canongate), Telling Tales (2014, Canongate)
— E.M. Ayovunefe
Grace Nichols (b. 1950)
Born in 1950 in Georgetown, Guyana, Grace Nichols majored in Communications at the University of Guyana and worked in the South American capital as a teacher, journalist, and in government information services, before emigrating to the United Kingdom in 1977 with her partner, fellow Afro-Guyanese poet and playwright John Agard. In 1983, Nichols’ debut collection I is a long memoried woman was published to resounding critical acclaim, for which she was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize later that year. Following the life of an unnamed African-Caribbean woman, Nichols offers an unflinching and unforgiving examination of what it has meant to be a Black woman in the Caribbean, from the early inhumanities of slavery and imperialism through to the love, fervour, and determination of anticolonial resistance, a ‘fireritual and bloodfeast, a banner of heads on spikes, the black surge.’ In 2007, Nichols was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2020, she published her fifteenth book, a volume of poems entitled Passport to Here and There. Enshrined in the English literary heritage as one of Britain’s foremost contemporary poets, Nichols’ work is studied regularly by British students undertaking the GCSE in English Literature.
Recommended reads: I is a long memoried woman (1983, Karnak), Sunris (1996, Virago)
— E.M. Ayovunefe
Sophia Thakur (b. 1996)
Spoken word artist and poet Sophia Thakur was born in London to a half-Gambian half-Indian father and a half-Gambian, half-Sri Lankan mother. She has been cited as “our generation’s first poetry influencer”, and her career has truly fledged alongside the development of the social media era. At the age of just sixteen Sophia had made her first public poetry performance, spurred on by her success in a school poetry competition just a year prior. Since, alongside achieving a degree in Politics from the University of Birmingham, she has gone on to deliver two TED talks, perform on over 300 stages including Glastonbury and collaborate on global campaigns for BET, Samsung, Nike, MTV and Channel 4. Her poetry is epistolary, yielding a raw, vulnerable quality that feels almost invasive to listen to or read too closely, but it is this intimacy that captivates her audience. In her poem ‘Dear Cancer’ she speaks candidly of the loss of her grandmother: ‘Cancer you always have a way of reminding me that forever is only a state of mind that I will try to defy’, verbalising the universal experience of grappling with mortality during periods of grief. Her background as a spoken word artist lends itself to her written poetry by giving it a rhythmicity and musicality which can be seen throughout her debut anthology Somebody Give This Heart a Pen.
Recommended reads: Somebody Give This Heart a Pen (2011, flipped eye)
— Jessica Fatoye
Warsan Shire (b. 1988)
Warsan Shire is a British poet, writer, and activist. Born in Kenya to Somalian parents, her family migrated to the UK when she was only one year old. Her work often draws on the complexities of refugee and immigrant identity centered around her own experiences of her and those close to her. She first gained notoriety after the publication of her 2011 collection Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and has since gone on to publish three further collections, with a fourth anticipated in 2021. Her poems are cathartic and stripped of grandeur, taking on an authentic narrative tone. Her subjects are neither fantastical nor supernatural but human, and she approaches their stories in a holistic manner, making her poems as inherently political as life itself. With lines like ‘Your daughter’s face is a small riot’ from the poem Ugly, Shire exemplifies this uncompromisingly forthright tone as she grapples with the idea of war. Shire’s career has been internationally lauded; in 2013, she won the Brunel University African Poetry Prize and was named Young Poet Laureate for London; in 2014, she was made the poet-in-residence for Queensland, Australia; and in 2018 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her career even crossed paths with the music industry when she featured in Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade (2016) and most recent film Black Is King (2020). Her work can be summarised through a quote from a 2015 interview with Alexis Okeowo ‘I either know, or I am, every person I have written about for or as.’
Recommended reads: Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2019, Walker Books)
— Jessica Fatoye
This interview is part of Onyx Magazine’s series for International Women’s Day 2021, view other features here: