Penguin Modern Poets 3

Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her pamphlet, Breadfruit, was published by flipped eye in 2007, and her Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize-winning collection, Pepper Seed, followed in 2013 from Peepal Tree. She has written for the stage and radio. She was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, as well as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the UK’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap. She is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the recipient of many other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of the former S. S. Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.

Warsan Shire is a Somali-British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. She wrote the poetry for the visual album Lemonade and Disney film Black Is King in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. She also wrote the short film Brave Girl Rising highlighting the voices and faces of Somali girls in Africa's largest refugee camp. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, her debut collection, was published in 2022 and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and Forward Prize for Best First Collection that year. Warsan lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.