SBWN Co-directors Jeda Pearl Lewis and Dean Atta share their reflections on 2021 and plans for 2022 with Nasim Rebecca Asl.
They discuss some of SBWN’s partnerships, events including the conference, behind-the-scenes work including access and some of their hopes and plans for 2022.
Dean is sadly stepping down as co-director and shares why – spoiler alert, it involves three books!
Nasim Rebecca Asl is a member of the SBWN community and is a Glasgow based poet and journalist whose work has appeared in multiple magazines. She is currently taking part in the Poetry Translation Centre’s Polylingual Poets Please programme. In 2021 she was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for Poetry and appeared on Damian Barr’s The Big Scottish Book Club.
Watch and/or listen to our captioned video, or read the transcript below.
Captions are by Jeda, who is hard of hearing and a caption user, though not a professional captioner. In the video above, Jeda mentions Collective Text who we often use for professionally captioning our recordings.
Download the transcript (Google doc)
2021 SBWN Co-directors
Dean Atta was named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday. His debut poetry collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. His Young Adult novel in verse, The Black Flamingo, won the 2020 Stonewall Book Award, and was shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, YA Book Prize and Jhalak Prize. Dean’s Twitter
Jeda Pearl Lewis is a disabled Scottish-Jamaican writer and poet. She has performed at StAnza, Push the Boat Out, Event Horizon, Inky Fingers, Hidden Door. Jeda was awarded Cove Park’s Emerging Writer Residency in 2019 and she is published/commissioned by Black Lives Matter Mural Trail, New Writing Scotland, Not Going Back to Normal, Tapsalteerie, Shoreline of Infinity, Rhubaba, Collective, British Council, and Peepal Tree Press. @JedaPearl jedapearl.com
