PATIENCE AGBABI, POET - Find out all about Patience Agbabi via my YouTube playlist of videos about Patience Agbabi and via links to her website and other relevant websites. These include poems, interviews and reviews. Patience Agbabi is a poet, performer and workshop facilitator. She was born in London in 1965 to Nigerian parents and spent her teenage years living in North Wales. She was educated at Oxford University and has appeared at numerous diverse venues in the UK and abroad. R.A.W., her groundbreaking debut collection of poetry, was published in 1995, and won the 1997 Excelle Literary Award. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry and IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain. Transformatrix, a commentary on late twentieth-century Britain and a celebration of poetic form, was published in 2000. It received excellent reviews in publications including the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and Poetry Review.A poet who tours extensively, Patience Agbabi collaborated with Adeola Agbebiyi and Dorothea Smartt to create FO(U)R WOMEN, a polyvocal performance piece which premiered at the ICA in 1996. She was a member of Atomic Lip, poetry’s first pop group, from 1995 to 1998 whose final tour, Quadrophonix, 1998, incorporated video with live performance. She has recently taken part in Modern Love, a UK tour featuring a number of Spoken Word poets exploring the themes of love and modern relationships. In March 2002, she toured Modern Love in Switzerland with poet and playwright Malika Booker.Primarily a solo performer, Patience Agbabi has read repeatedly at key literature festivals in the UK including the Edinburgh Book Festival and Ledbury Poetry Festival; and music festivals including Glastonbury Festival and Soho Jazz Festival. She has also worked extensively for The British Council, delivering her work in a range of venues from university lecture theatres to a metro station, in countries including Namibia, 1999, the Czech Republic, 2000, Zimbabwe and Germany, 2001, and Switzerland, 2002. Her work has also appeared on television and radio. In 1998 her work was featured on Channel 4’s Litpop series and she was commissioned by the BBC to write a poem for the Blue Peter National Children’s Poetry Competition in 1999. An experienced workshop facilitator, Patience Agbabi has completed a number of successful residencies. After being selected for the Poetry Places scheme run by the Poetry Society, she was in-house poet at The Poetry Café, 1999, and Flamin’ Eight, a London-based tatoo and piercing studio, from 1999 to 2000. From January to June 2001, she was Poet-in-Residence at Oxford Brookes University, where she devised, taught and graded a Poetry Writing module for English Literature undergraduates and delivered a wide range of workshops for trainee nurses and teaching staff in the School of Healthcare. In 2005, she was Poet-in-Residence at Eton College, Windsor, where she taught a range of poetry writing/performance workshops; conducted Eton’s first poetry slams for upper and lower school and performed her poetry. This received huge press coverage, including articles in The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Evening Standard and The New York Times.In 2002, she obtained an MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education at the University of Sussex in Brighton. She has been Lecturer in Creative Writing at several universities: the University of Greenwich (2002-2003); the University of Wales, Cardiff (2002-2004); and the University of Kent at Canterbury (2004-2005).