Beyond Books with Cut From The Same Cloth?

About our guest contributors:

Sabeena Akhtar is a Writer/Editor and an Arts and Culture programmer working across a variety of literary festivals. She is the Festival Coordinator of Bare Lit, the U.K’s principal festival celebrating remarkable writers in the diaspora. A co-founder of the Primadonna Festival which spotlights the work of women writers, the Primadonna Prize for writing and Bare Lit Kids, the UK’s first children’s festival showcasing the work of writers of colour. She is also Senior Programmer at the WOW Foundation, working on it’s London festival at the Southbank Centre. A keen advocate for Partition commemoration, in 2017 she partook in the BBC’s coverage of the 70th anniversary of Indian independence and alongside her daughter, filmed a programme on the Partition of India for children. She has since been invited to discuss the subject on various media outlets. She has published a wide variety of work including editing Cut From The Same Cloth? an anthology by visibly Muslim women in Britain, Talking About Islamophobia published by Hachette and is currently working on a novel.  You can find Sabeena tweeting at @pocobookreader

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is an educator, award-winning poet and published writer from Leeds. She is the author of poetry collection,Postcolonial Banter, co-author of the anthology, A Fly Girl’s Guide to University: Being a woman of colour at Cambridge and other institutions of power and elitism; co-essayist in I Refuse to Condemn: resisting racism in times of national security; Cut from the Same Cloth?Muslim women on life in Britain; and host of theBreaking Binaries podcast. Her work disrupts common understandings of history, race, knowledge and power – particularly interrogating the purpose of narratives about Muslims, gender and violence. She is published inThe Guardian, Independent, Al-Jazeera, gal-dem and her poetry performances have millions of views online. Suhaiymah is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London and her poetry, articles and books can be found on University and school syllabi. You can find Suhaiymah tweeting at @thebrownhijabi

Sophie Williams has been editing books, articles and screenplays for over ten years. She currently homeschools her three children in London and dreams of moving her family to Scotland.

Hodan Yusuf is a poet, writer, playwright and actress. She is a multimedia freelance journalist and a mediator and trainer in conflict resolution. Hodan has a BA Hons in Human Geography & Environmental Policy and a Diploma in Journalism. She has a MSc in Conflict Resolution & Mediation Studies from the University of London. Hodan has delivered workshops, spoken at and read her poetry at many universities, events and festivals. This includes IHRC, York University, Oxford University, University of East London, Muslim Institute, BareLit Festival, UK Parliament, British Library, University of Exeter, Amnesty International, the Tate Gallery and others. In 2019, Hodan’s screen debut acting role saw her land a part in a J.J. Abrams & Warner Bros production. Hodan wrote, directed and performed her first play in 2020, for an International theatre festival screened live on Zoom from London, Delhi and San Francisco. Hodan continues to develop her craft as an actor while working on her debut poetry collection.You can find Hodan tweeting at @hyfreelance