Poets of colour incubator
Three emerging poets of colour from the North of England have been selected as the inaugural cohort for the first Poets of Colour Incubator.
Meet the incubator poets
Three emerging poets of colour from the North of England have been selected as the inaugural cohort for the first Poets of Colour Incubator.
The new Incubator poets, Princess Arinola Adegbite, Jeremy Pak Nelson and Ilisha Thiru Purcell, will be part of a 12-month mentoring, change agency and creative development Incubator to innovate their practice and create a ‘poetic response’ to a global challenge they want to interrogate.
A collaboration between Words of Colour and Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Incubator will help the three poets develop their ideas on diaspora, home and the weaponising of the term migrant, artificial intelligence’s influence on human perception, and trauma survivors’ relationship with sleep.
Each poet will receive a £6,000 Creative Action Bursary to explore, develop and research their idea with mentoring and masterclasses by acclaimed poets Malika Booker, Kit Fan, Shamshad Khan, Nick Makoha and Roger Robinson. They will also have access to creative entrepreneurship, creative wellbeing and digital inclusion expertise.
Princess Arinola Adegbite, a poet, performance artist, filmmaker and musician from Salford, said: “I feel genuinely honoured to be selected. I want the programme to give me space to experiment, develop new work and take time to invest in my goals as an artist. I plan to explore artificial intelligence and technology’s influence on human perception, reality and relationships through poetry and conceptual art instructions.”
Bio
Princess Arinola Adegbite (She/Her)
Princess Arinola Adegbite (aka Bitez) is a poet, performance artist, filmmaker and musician funded by Factory International, Youth Music and MOBO Help Musicians from Salford. Princess is also a member of Young Identity and The Writing Squad. She is a winner of Slambassadors, BBC Words First 2020, Slam-O-Vision Manchester Champion 2021 and Manchester Young Creative of The Year 2021. Princess is also a winner of Grooveverse Poetry and Jazz Slam. Her in-progress poetry collection ‘Algorithms of Meaning’ won an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2023.
Jeremy Pak Nelson, a writer and artist from Hong Kong, based in Manchester, said: “I’m thrilled to be part of this inaugural cohort. My focus is on the diaspora experience and the notion of home. “The opportunities the Incubator provides for discussion with the wider public will be important for learning how we can reopen or reframe conversations that so easily become bogged down in the language of social media and political messaging.”
Bio
Jeremy Pak Nelson (He/Him)
Jeremy Pak Nelson is a writer and artist from Hong Kong. Based in Manchester, he holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His preoccupations include outdated methods of putting words on paper, folk fiddle, accordion and the game of go. His work has appeared in the Jellyfish Review, Solarpunk Magazine and has been selected as an Editors’ Pick for the Imagine 2200 climate fiction project.
Ilisha Thiru Purcell, a poet based in and from Newcastle upon Tyne, added: “I am so excited to be part of the Incubator. I was drawn to the Incubator’s unique focus on creative wellbeing so I can develop holistically while learning with and from others. In my project I want to explore sleep, dreams and nightmares from the perspective of trauma survivors to create new poetic forms based on the mechanisms of sleep.”
Bio
Ilisha Thiru Purcell (She/Her)
Ilisha Thiru Purcell is a poet based in and from Newcastle upon Tyne. Her work has appeared in publications such as Popshot, Butcher’s Dog and Dear Damsels. Ilisha won a commission to perform at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival and is a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North where she is working on a poetry film inspired by the classical Tamil love poetry, akam poetry. She is a member of the collective Brown Girls Write and she was selected to be part of Apples and Snakes’ development programme Words a Stage 2.0.
