Headliner: Bohdan Piasecki

Bohdan Piasecki is a poet from Poland based in Birmingham. A committed performer, he has taken his poems from the upstairs room in an Eastbourne pub to the main stage of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from underground Tokyo clubs to tramways in Paris, from a bookshop in Beijing to an airfield in Germany, from niche podcasts to BBC Radio. In the UK, he regularly features at the country’s most exciting spoken word nights, festivals, and readings. He enjoys the creative chaos of big field festivals just as much as the composed concentration of literary events. 

Bohdan founded the first poetry slam in Poland before moving to the UK to get a doctorate in translation studies. He has worked as Director of Education on the Spoken Word in Education MA course at Goldsmiths University, and was the Midlands Producer for Apples and Snakes between 2010 and 2017. Since 2012, he has been a regular Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. He currently holds the post of General Manager at Free Radical, a Birmingham-based company creating opportunities for young artists with an activist practice.

Headliner: Inua Ellams

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a cross art form practitioner, a poet, playwright and performer, graphic artist and designer, and founder of the Midnight Run - an international, arts-filled, night-time, playful, urban, walking experience. He is a Complete Works poet alumni and a designer at White Space Creative Agency.

Across his work, identity, displacement and destiny are recurring themes in which he also tries to mix the old with the new: traditional african storytelling with contemporary poetry, pencil with pixel, texture with vector images. His poetry is published by Flipped Eye, Akashic, Nine Arches and several plays have been published by Oberon.

@InuaEllams

Emerging: Malakaï Sargeant

Malakaï is a writer, producer and director guy who works bare within theatre to promote inclusivity within the performing arts sector. He freelances so, naturally, he complains about being broke a lot of the time.

You can find him sitting in a lot of meetings, often as the only brown person, staring blankly while pretending to take notes. Really, he's probably jotting down ideas for a poem, play or essay about gentrification, black masculinity, being sad for no reason or his nan.

He is an alumni of the Barbican Young Poets collective, and currently co-runs poetry movement Veranda. Malakaï is Co Executive Director of theatre company The S+K Project.

@MalakaiSargeant.

Malakaï s website