Notes on Compassion: Words, Music and Us

Featuring new work from Vanessa Kissule, AWATE, Momtaza Mehri , FaceSoul, Rachel Long and Sukina Noor commissioned by Counterpoints Arts and Southbank Centre.

Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won over ten slam titles including The Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014 and the Nuoryican Poetry Slam. She has been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Blue Peter, Don’t Flop and TEDx in Vienna. She has appeared at an array of literary and music festivals and was Glastonbury Festival’s Resident Poet in 2019. She has been invited to perform all over the world from Belgium to Brazil to Bangladesh.

Rachel Long is a poet and the founder of Octavia – Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour, which is housed at Southbank Centre, London. She was shortlisted for Young Poet for Laureate for London in 2014 and awarded a Jerwood/Arvon Foundation mentorship in 2015. Rachel has run poetry workshops for The Poetry School, The Serpentine Galleries and at University of Oxford. She is Assistant Tutor to Jacob Sam La-Rose on the Barbican Young Poets programme 2015-present.

AWATE is a critically acclaimed rapper, writer, producer and performer focused on stories at the intersection of race, class and surrealism – with a dose of humour. Awate’s 2018 debut album, Happiness was supported by BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra, Spotify, Noisey, MOBO x Help Musicians UK and called a, “British rap masterpiece” by Trench Magazine.

Momtaza Mehri is a poet and independent researcher working across criticism, translation, anti-disciplinary research practices, education, and radio. She is a former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University (Los Angeles). Her writing has appeared in the likes of POETRY, Granta, Vogue, The Guardian, Bidoun, and The White Review. A former Columnist-in-Residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space, she has also completed residencies at St. Paul’s Cathedral and the British Library.

Sukina Noor is a poet, spoken-word artist, playwright, workshop facilitator and educator, artistic curator, writer and public speaker. She has toured extensively across UK, Europe, America and Africa performing, delivering poetry workshops, partaking in panel discussions and delivering lectures.

Faisal Salah, known by his stage name ‘Facesoul’ is a London-based artist born in East Africa. He moved with his family to the UK at the age of 2 and has been singing for as long as he has can remember. At 19 he began travelling the world, performing for different communities and sharing his story through his voice. Faisal’s upbringing with traditional Islamic roots have been paramount to forming his truth and identity and his sense of spirituality is imbued in his practice. When he started performing at 15, he would combine his love of singing, poetry and storytelling as a tool to escape from the constraints of inner city living, and aspire for something better.

Image: Sukina Noor