“I am a gifted shapeshifter, able to adjust myself to the rules of almost any environment. But I’m tired of shrinking. Belonging is a fairy tale. I wish to be with the unruly people.”
Poet
Ballroom and the endless quest for belonging
‘In ballroom, I feel legible in ways I am not, or feel I am not, elsewhere.’
A fatal forgetting
‘The clock radio shocks me awake. A bulletin about the first ever AI-generated popstar to be signed by a record label.’
The poet who was afraid of the dark
‘The best children’s stories assume a child’s capacity to absorb difficult feelings that don’t resolve.’
Vanessa Kisuule in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
‘The spoken word poem takes the shape of its context, from performance to performance, each night is different and you feel different each time you read aloud.’
Biography
Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won more than ten slam titles including the Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014 and the Nuyorican Poetry Slam. Her poem on the historic toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, ‘Hollow’, went viral in the summer of 2020.
She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books and her work was highly commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. She was the Bristol City Poet for 2018-2020 and is currently working on her debut novel.
