Initiation[s]: Workshop with Kayo Chingonyi

Hone your writing and performing skills in this exploratory cross-arts workshop led by ICA Associate Poet Kayo Chingonyi. This workshop invites you to delve into the experience of growth from youth to maturity through spoken word, performance and design. Inspired by characters from the Mukanda, a Zambian rite of passage that brings guidance and protection to the transition into adulthood, you will experiment with masking, wording and performing to give voice to your own experiences of becoming young adults.

Kayo Chingonyi is a writer, editor, events producer, and creative writing tutor. His poems have been published in a range of magazines and anthologies and in a debut pamphlet entitled Some Bright Elegance (Salt Publishing, 2012). In 2013 he was awarded a writing residency at Cove Park (Scotland) as well as the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize from the Poetry Society. He represented Zambia at Poetry Parnassus, is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity in British Poetry, and has been invited to give readings and performances across the UK and further afield in Ireland, Mexico, Abu Dhabi, and South Africa. Kayo is currently working on his first full-length collection entitled Kumukanda and a new pamphlet is forthcoming from the African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Brooklyn-based independent publisher Akashic Books, in 2016.