Yrsa Daley-Ward

Yrsa Daley-Ward is a poet, a writer and an actor. Born in Lancashire, England, she was raised by her grandparents, who were strict Seventh Day Adventists. Daley-Ward spent years struggling to make ends meet as a creative. Because of lack of opportunities in England, she moved to South Africa to pursue work. While there, she began writing and performing her own poetry. As she told the Guardian, “In acting and modeling, I was so busy expressing what somebody else wanted that I’d completely shut down my own voice. I didn’t have any mirrors. When I was 20, I was in knots. I couldn’t speak my reality to anybody. There’s no cage now. Lots of people are afraid to tell the truth.”

Daley-Ward began posting poems to Instagram and soon gained a following. She self-published her first collection of poetry Bone in 2014. Bone was subsequently republished by Penguin Books with a foreword from Kiese Laymon. Daley-Ward is also the author of the memoir The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir (2018).