Leeds Young Authors are a group of young people who meet weekly to write and perform poetry. I am interested in the group because they contribute to the creative map of Chapeltown. Also, I have seen some of the older poets from Leeds Young Authors perform at Letterbomb in Leeds before and I know they go to poetry slams in America and their work was brilliant. So I am going along to the group tonight to find out more and meet more young people.
So, before the young people arrived I chatted with Khadijah Ibrahim and Paulette Morris who were running the session. They were saying that when they were at school in the 70s was the most exciting time for creative energy in Chapeltown as young black people didn’t have many opportunities in education so had to make their own ways of working and expressing themselves. From talking to them it seems that lots of artists, poets, musicians, performers from the area work internationally and come back to Chapeltown to give back to the community although they aren’t necessarily known about in the rest of Leeds. I find this strange because surely this should be something for the city of Leeds to boast about!
Names that come up include Leonora Stapleton and Harlem Dance, Kuffdem theatre, David Hamilton and Phoenix Dance. Paulette tells me how her Dad was the first peripatetic steel drum teacher in Leeds and that he went round lots of schools in the Leeds area at a time lots of people had never seen a black man before in more rural areas.
