The conversation takes place online, on Thursday 5th February 2026, from 7pm till 8.30pm UK time as part of a series marking 100 years of Black History commemorations in the African diaspora.
The event is free and open to all.
Tickets are available here.
WITH
Jim Aitken, Afsaneh Gitiforouz, Samuel Julius Habakkuk Kargbo, Nada Menzalji, Karuna Mistry, Ambrose Musiyiwa, Xaviera Ringeling, Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure
HOST
Dr Tamara Wilson, Exiled Writers Ink Chair
ABOUT THE POETS
Jim Aitken is a poet and dramatist living and working in Edinburgh. He is a tutor in Scottish Cultural Studies with Adult Education and he organises literary walks around the city. His last poetry collection was Declarations of Love, published in 2022. Jim is a widely published poet and Associate Editor with Culture Matters.
Afsaneh Gitiforouz is a British Iranian poet, novelist, and a committee member of Exiled Writers Ink. Her work has appeared in SIDHE PRESS anthologies To Light The Trails (2024) and To Lay Sun Into a Forest (2025), as well as in Radical Roots (2024). The Barbican commissioned her in 2022 to lead the poetry session of Age of Many Posts.
Samuel Julius Habakkuk Kargbo is a Sierra Leonean. He is popularly known as Rabbi, the Watchman, or God Poet. He was born in Wilberforce village, Freetown. He has a BSc in Chemistry from Fourah Bay College, US and an MSc in Environmental Sciences (Hons) from Cyprus International University. Until recently, he was researching Environmental Toxicology at Nagasaki University in Japan. He celebrates others as he loves to see people grow and metamorphose into butterflies.
Nada Menzalji is a British-Syrian poet, author, journalist, and translator. She has published several Arabic poetry collections, including Withered Petals for Dinner and Dark Spots on the Back of the Palm. Her work appears in multiple languages, and her English selection Traces and Blossoms was published by Exiled Writers Ink. She has performed internationally, including as a guest poet at the United Nations.
Karuna Mistry is a British writer from Leicester who’s been published in 70+ anthologies with >100 individual poems. He has two poetry books, You-me-verse-all Hueman (2025) and debut, Sojourn: Transcending Seasons (2024) https://www.instagram.com/
Ambrose Musiyiwa is a poet and journalist with a background in the intersection between activism, migration, and community action. He coordinates Journeys in Translation, an international, volunteer-driven initiative that is translating Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) into other languages. He is also on the editorial board of the Africa Migration Report Poetry Anthology Series.
Xaviera Ringeling is a Chilean bilingual poet residing in London since 2012. Her poetry in Spanish was awarded the 2019 New Voices prize by the feminist publishing house Torremozas in Spain. Her first poetry book, Alba, was published in October 2019 by El Ojo de la Cultura, in the UK. She participated in the anthology Leyendo PoesÃa in London and her poetry in English has been published in the Greenwich Poetry Workshop Pamphlet: The Tide Turns and in the online magazine Perro Negro. Her poetry is included in the anthology Equidistant Voices: Latin American poets in the UK (2023).
Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure is a bilingual award-winning poet, novelist, librettist, short story writer, translator and visual artist who grew up in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Her novel, Weeping Tomato, won the National Arts Merit Award (NAMA) for Outstanding Fiction Book, in Zimbabwe in 2025. Her poetry collection, Starfish Blossoms (2022), won the NAMA for Outstanding Poetry Book, in 2023.
Dr Tamara Wilson is an award-winning poet, literary activist and academic whose essays, poems and translations have featured in national and international publications. As the granddaughter of Armenian and Pontic Greek orphans, she worked with diverse migrant and refugee groups both as an ESOL lecturer, charity worker and currently, as the chair of EWI. A devout defender of women and minority rights, she collaborated with several NGOs, charities, community centres, and research institutions against the employment of hate speech and discriminatory discourses as a performance of patriotism.
ABOUT THE ORGANISERS
Exiled Writers Ink is a London-based charitable organisation founded in 2000 by Jennifer Langer, and provides a platform for writers who are refugees, migrants or in exile, and serves as a bridge between displaced writers and the mainstream literary world.
The Africa Migration Report Poetry Anthology Series is a volunteer-led initiative organised by Forced Migration and The Arts in association with CivicLeicester and the migrants' rights collective, Regularise.
The series was inspired by the Africa Migration Report: 2nd Edition (African Union and International Organisation for Migration, 2024), and has open calls for poems (40 lines or less) and short prose (100 words or less) exploring:
The series was inspired by the Africa Migration Report: 2nd Edition (African Union and International Organisation for Migration, 2024), and has open calls for poems (40 lines or less) and short prose (100 words or less) exploring:
- African and African diasporic migration and (im)mobility,
- how African and Asian refugees are drowning in the English Channel, and
- Edward Nkoloso, Afronauts and the 1960s Zambian Space Programme.
We take the African diaspora to include all people of African descent in all the ways they define themselves, e.g. African, African American, African Asian, African Brazilian, African Canadian, African Caribbean, African Italian, African Latino, African Palestinian, Afropean, Afro Turk, Black British, Black Canadian, Black, etc.
So far we have released two poetry collections: Japa Fire: An Anthology of Poems on African and African Diasporic Migration (CivicLeicester, 2024), edited by Ambrose Musiyiwa and Munya R (both, Zimbabwe / UK), and From Here To There (CivicLeicester, 2025), edited by Nandi Jola (South Africa / Northern Ireland) and Omobola Osamor (Nigeria / USA).
"The songlines of migration" (Morning Star, 16 January 2026), Alan Morrison's review of From Here To There might also be of interest.
RECORDINGS
The readings and conversation will be recorded and made publicly accessible, in whole or in part, through the Africa Migration Report Poetry Anthology Series video playlist, and through social media and the website we are building around the anthology series.
The readings and conversation will be recorded and made publicly accessible, in whole or in part, through the Africa Migration Report Poetry Anthology Series video playlist, and through social media and the website we are building around the anthology series.
FURTHER NOTES
[1] Forced Migration and The Arts is a global network that brings together people with lived experience of forced migration, refugee and non-refugee artists, academics and activists from around the world. The network, initial stages of which where developed with support from the University of Manchester's Humanities Global Scholars Fund hosts monthly discussion panels around forced migration and the arts, and encourages mutual support and collaboration.
[1] Forced Migration and The Arts is a global network that brings together people with lived experience of forced migration, refugee and non-refugee artists, academics and activists from around the world. The network, initial stages of which where developed with support from the University of Manchester's Humanities Global Scholars Fund hosts monthly discussion panels around forced migration and the arts, and encourages mutual support and collaboration.
[2] Regularise is a collective of humans made up of migrants, citizens and allies who are committed to centreing and amplifying the voices and needs of undocumented migrants. The collective was founded in late 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, to address the years of sustained hardships that undocumented migrants experience in the UK and continues to organise and campaign for justice and for the rights of undocumented migrants.
[3] CivicLeicester, a community media channel and indy publisher that uses digital and print technologies to highlight conversations of transnational significance, are publishers of poetry anthologies that include Japa Fire: An Anthology of Poems on African and African Diasporic Migration (2024), Welcome to Britain: An Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction (2023), and Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World (2020).
[4] Forced Migration and The Arts and the Africa Migration Report Poetry Anthology Series are volunteer-led and committed to seeing the emergence of a world in which the African migrant is treated with dignity and respect on the continent and around the world. To cover some of the costs associated with the work, we have Buymeacoffee and a crowdfunding appeal. Any support you can lend us in spreading the word about these and about books in the series will be appreciated.
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