Evie Wyld is Booktrust's third online writer in residence.

  • The Plosives

    Posted Monday November 30th 2009
    by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

    I spend more and more time with my daughter these days and she is teaching me an infant poetry all over again. She has a particular obsession with what elocution professionals call ‘plosives’ at the moment, with her favourite sound being the letter ‘b’. Her most common word is ‘book’ and variants of the word ‘book’- all I hear some days is book-a-book-a-bok-bok-bok for hours and hours and hours.

    But one thing is clear- she appreciates the rhythm of it all; it is all said at a particular tempo and sometimes she claps as she mumbles. So for her, maybe, these are the roots of music and musicality, but I’m sure every parent has a different experience. Some children respond to shapes, some to facial expressions, some to colours… an entire gamut of things- and that diversity of development trajectories is one of the reasons I am always grateful to Georgia Popoff, a US-poet, for sharing her approach to work in school with me when I was just beginning to do run workshops. One of the key tools she shared with me was her alphabet poem (I still use a modified version of it) a 26-page poem which has a…

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  • An interview with Booktrust writer-in-residence, Nii Ayikwei Parkes [1]

    Posted Friday November 6th 2009
    by Nikesh Shukla

    In part 1 of our interview with writer-in-residence Nii Aykwei Parkes, we ask him about good poetry, performing and his early gigs.

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