Encounters with James Baldwin: celebrating 100 years

About Fred D'AguiarLindsay BarrettPaterson JosephPeter KaluRay ShellSu AndiTade ThompsonZita Holbourne

Stella Dadzie writer and activist is best known for her co-authorship of The Heart of the Race: Black Women's lives in Britain which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature. She is a founder member of OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent) a national umbrella group that emerged in the late 1970s as part of the British Civil Rights movement and was recently described as one of the grandmothers of Black Feminism in the UK. Her career as a teacher writer artist and education activist spans over 40 years. She previously worked with editor Cheryl Robson on 'Hairvolution: Her Hair Her Story Our History'.Kadija George Sesay co-editor MBE Hon. FRSL is a British literary activist short story writer and poet of Sierra Leonean descent and the publisher and managing editor of the magazine SABLE LitMag. Her work has earned her many awards and nominations including the Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement in 1994 Candace Woman of Achievement in 1996 The Voice Community Award in Literature in 1999 and the Millennium Woman of the Year in 2000. She is the General Secretary for African Writers Abroad (PEN International) and organises the Writers' HotSpot - trips for writers abroad where she teaches creative writing and journalism courses.Sesay has edited or co-edited several books including Burning Words Flaming Images: Poems and Short Stories by Writers of African Descent (1996) IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (with Courttia Newland 2000)56 Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa (Flipped Eye Publishing 2005) and (as Kadija George) Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers (Aurora Metro Books 2005) Write Black Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature (Hansib Publications 2005). In 2007 she created the first SABLE Literary Festival in The Gambia where she now programmes the Mboka literary festival and bookfair which she co-founded in 2016.Sesay's first full collection of poems entitled Irki was published in 2013. Her poetry short stories and essays have appeared in a range of publications including the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby. In 2021 with Joan Anim-Addo and Deirdre Osborne she curated This is The Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books highlighting alternatives by people of African or Asian descent and indigenous peoples.