The Showroom’s poet-in-residence Alfiah Jade Brown leads a poetry performance with Year 9 Students from King Solomon Academy - the culmination of a 10 week project at the school.

Over a 10-week residency of workshops at local school, King Solomon Academy, Alfiah Jade Brown collaborated with Year 9 students to create a series of original poetry, mixed-media artworks, and a schools literacy resource. Launched alongside Ângela Ferreira’s Slits Are Girls the project drew on the radical energy of punk-using language as a site of resistance and asking how poetry can act, disrupt, and reimagine.

Led by Alfiah, the workshops built a curriculum grounded in lived experience-opening space to explore school systems, teenage pressures, diasporic identities and family life. Writing became a portal into memories and moments that can often be left out of formalised school curriculums.

Over time, the group began to see themselves as poets- blending English with Arabic, Bengali and slang, refusing ideas of what is “correct,” and reshaping language on their own terms. What emerged was a shared space of trust, experimentation and resistance.

This project was expansive and transgressive. The classroom became a site of questioning, where dominant structures could be challenged and reconfigured.

As part of the project we have published a schools and young people’s resource designed by Akif Rahman and edited by Miracle Nwaizu with Arabic translation by Aimee Morcos.

This project was part of MaxLiteracy, generously supported by the Max Reinhardt Charitable Trust and Engage.