Walk With Us

There is a star that has been watching.

It watched the enslaved navigate to freedom by its light. It shone over Alabama the night Rosa Parks refused to move. It was over the River Aire when David Oluwale fell, and it was shining for Stephen Lawrence on Well Hall Road.

The star never stopped watching. And it never stopped remembering.

Walk With Us is a poetry collection with a mission. Black British and Caribbean history is rich with heroes — figures who shaped communities, challenged injustice and refused to be silenced. Yet their names rarely appear in classrooms, on monuments or in mainstream history. Some have been softened into footnotes. Others buried entirely.

This collection names them.

From the warrior queen Sanité Belair, who faced a firing squad at twenty-one and declared I am a soldier, to the Queens of Fireburn who set St Croix ablaze in 1878. From Claudia Jones, who gave Britain the Notting Hill Carnival, to Olive Morris, who fought for Black women's rights from the rooftops of Brixton. From Una Marson, the first Black female producer at the BBC, to Steve 'Grizzly' Nisbett, whose drumbeat was the heartbeat of a revolution.

Through haiku and heroic couplets, dub verse and dramatic monologue, folk epic and free verse, each form is chosen for its subject. Each poem is an act of restoration.

Walk With Us is a recovery mission conducted through poetry. These voices once spoke boldly, marched defiantly and dreamed expansively. They are speaking again.

Twinkle, twinkle, in your heart. Don't give up. We've come too far.

The ancestors are waiting to be introduced.

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