I Am Evidence
Courtney Conrad’s powerful work interrogates the tensions within Caribbean migration, gender-based violence and national politics. Migrating from Kingston as a teenager, she is unflinching in her attempts to capture the vibrancy and violence of her experiences in both the UK and Jamaica. Her poetry draws together subversive diasporic imagery, national political commentary and shatteringly personal narrative in its exacting response to the political corruption and violence she witnessed as a young girl in Jamaica in the wake of its colonial subjugation under the British Empire. The themes of her work stretch across state- and gender-based violence, religion, raw bodily introspection and lush cultural memorabilia that reimagines the warmth and blood of both her homes.
I Am Evidence was the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker. It was also the winner of the 2023 Michael Marks Poetry Award and includes some work which won her an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. It is her debut pamphlet.
Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet who now lives in London. Her debut pamphlet I Am Evidence (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2023) was the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker. It was also the winner of the 2023 Michael Marks Poetry Award and includes some work which won her an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. She received a Bridport Prize Young Writer Award in 2021. She was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award’s Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in Magma Poetry, The White Review, Poetry Review, Bath Magg and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. She is an alumna of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, MPK, Obsidian, Griots Well Collective, Roundhouse Poetry Collective, and Barbican Young Poets.
