Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet, author and educator who completed a world tour with her last collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of 3 collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of inter-connecting short stories The Night Alphabet. Her new poetry collection CUNTO was featured on the Radio 4 programme Butch, which she also presented, and will be published by Saqi Books in June 2021. She is the commissioning editor of Out-Spoken Press, and also the host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre.

The interview was conducted on 1 October 2020 by Sally Wood as part of Poet in the City's "What is an Activist?" online event for National Poetry Day.