Joanna Skelt

Joanna Skelt holds a PhD in African Studies. She has run writing workshops in arts centres, schools and libraries and in settings such as a Somali restaurant and a city allotment in Birmingham. Her dramatic readings are sometimes accompanied by improvised jazz performances. The Arts Council of England commissioned Joanna to write and perform poetry with Sierra Leonean poet Syl Cheney Coker and to coordinate a literature and citizenship project between Freetown and Birmingham, working with musicians from City of Birmingham Symphony Hall. Having moved around England to Birmingham and worked in Ghana and Sierra Leone, and earlier in Nigeria, Uganda and Jamaica, her poems represent a unique international English, or perhaps Anglopolitan, perspective and gaze. Her current research explores representations of the Pakistani community in the UK.