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Still Dancing (Shirley May Special Edition) Windrush 75 episode artwork

Jun 22, 2023 16 min

Still Dancing (Shirley May Special Edition) Windrush 75

from Can Art Save Us? Hosted by Paula Moore

Can Art Save Us? – Conversations on Arts, Mental Health, Social Justice & Wellbeing. In this special edition, short interview, I had the pleasure to talk again to Shirley May who featured in Season 3 which was dedicated to poetry and spoken word artists. Shirley May is an acclaimed poet, writer and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of literature. She is also CEO and Artistic Director of Young Identity, Manchester's premier spoken word collective in the UK. To complement her one hour episode, repeated in Season 4, see listing, She Wrote Her Own Eulogy, this special edition celebrates Windrush 75. We talk about the experience of her parents leaving Jamaica for Britain and Shirley shares stories not included in her book 'She Wrote Her Own Eulogy.' We talk about her mother's active, community work supporting citizenship administration and her father's resilience and response to racism. Find out who is 'still dancing' and why the commemorative events of Windrush 75 are so important. See additional links and Young Identity interviews below. Season 4 features 7 Windrush specific interviews with world class and award winning artists, just look for titles with 'Windrush 75.' You can hear more from the Young Identity poets in Season 3 too, who also share Caribbean and African heritage. See Season 3 listings: 'The Courage and Craft of Two Poets' 'Pain, Poetry and a Jamaican born Nigerian Princess'. Discover Shirley May and Young Identity: www.youngidentity.org/ Find out more about #Justice4Windrush: www.justice4windrush.org/ Series Audio Editor - Courtesy of Joey Quan. Series Music - Courtesy of Barry J. Gibb Closed Captions are added to all interviews in this series. News and read only, text versions of every interview can also be found here: www.canartsaveus.com © Can Art Save Us? All rights reserved. Content is for informational purposes only and not professional advice. Guest views are their own.

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Still Dancing (Shirley May Special Edition) Windrush 75

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Chapters

  1. 0:03 Introduction to Shirley May, poet and CEO.
  2. 1:27 Importance of the UK’s, Windrush 75 events
  3. 3:29 Her parents leave Jamaica for Britain in the 50s
  4. 5:14 Why the Windrush generation came to the UK
  5. 6:48 Her mother’s community activism in citizenship
  6. 8:45 The Windrush scandal and hostile legislation
  7. 10:15 Poetry extracts ’They Came with Backbone.’
  8. 12:04 Black women transforming the NHS and midwifery
  9. 13:47 Sacrifice, changing immigration laws and travesty

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This episode was published on June 22, 2023.

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