Performance poetry revolutionised me. When I was 13, my mother invited me to a group called Leeds Young Authors, which she co-ran with founder and poet Khadijah Ibrahiim. Together, along with visiting poets, they ran writing workshops for teenagers. The selling point was that I would get the chance to travel to the US to compete in a poetry slam festival, but the excitement of getting on an aeroplane was soon overshadowed by what I can only describe as enlightenment. Poems performed at the festival taught me about police brutality, gentrification and climate change before I even owned a computer. Performance poetry immersed me in a world of critical thinking, but also, a community of black poets. I shared stages, shook hands and was taught by some of the greatest black British and African American poets before the age of 20. From Sonia Sanchez to Saul Williams to Lemn Sissay and Jackie Kay.

Black British history and literature are intrinsically connected. Poems such as Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Five Nights of Bleeding explored the 1981 Brixton riots, while Benjamin Zephaniah’s The Death of Joy Gardner lamented on the killing of a Jamaican student who died in 1993 after being detained during a police immigration raid at her home. Literature was a forum for idea-sharing, community-building and support too. The Caribbean Artists Movement, founded by Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, Trinidadian publisher John La Rose and Panamanian-Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey in London in 1966, set about promoting the work of marginalised Caribbean artists, writers and poets. More than 50 years later, black writers are yet to be fully absorbed into the mainstream. A 2018 study found that only 7% of work published in poetry journals were by people from BAME backgrounds. Black voices have often felt like guests in UK literature, despite being routinely summoned during political events. “No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark” – a line from Home by the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire – was a prominent slogan of the migrant crisis in 2015.

Lack of visibility is a decades-old conversation. Booker prize winner Bernardine Evaristo set up the the Brunel international African poetry prize in 2012 for emerging African poets, because she felt they were absent from contemporary literature. The African American poet Danez Smith, who won a Forward prize in 2018, saw the need for a seismic shift in the UK, tweeting that British publishers and readers needed to look to their homegrown young BAME talent, especially those who come from spoken word: “You don’t need to outsource it, they’re here.”

Black British poets, many of whom got their start through performing, have always been on the periphery. The consensus for a long time seemed to be that “good” poetry was published, “bad” poetry was performed. As Kwame Dawes writes in Wasafiri Vol 18: “The black British ‘performance poet’ who decides to produce for the page is faced with a massive challenge. Publishers suspect that the work will simply not stand up in print.” For those who do manage to get book deals, as the recent viral hashtag #whatpublishingpaidme shows, many are undervalued compared with their white peers. Change is long overdue and everything from bookstore shelves to prize shortlists to publishing boardrooms needs to reflect the actual DNA of the country. Recently, more than 100 black authors formed the Black Writers’ Guild. Addressing a letter to the “big five” publishers – Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan – they called for transparency on “the submission-to-acquisition ratio of black authors” and requested “financial commitment to new awards recognising and amplifying black talent”.

The reforming of UK literature is an arts emergency. Roger Robinson’s success as the first black British poet to win the TS Eliot prize in 2020 is something that should be both applauded and interrogated. Earlier this month, I won an Eric Gregory award – a prize administered by the Society of Authors for a published or unpublished collection of poems by poets under 30. It’s a prize that not many black people have won, but I believe we are in the early days of a better future. Poetry is the language of urgency. It’s timely and timeless. Now more than ever, as the Black Lives Matter movement appears resolute on toppling racist and imperial structures, we need the words and radical ideas of black poets – to reimagine the kind of world we want to arise once the ash has settled.