Once long-listed as one of MTV’s Brand New Artist’s, Writer/ Poet Yomi Sode, who has been performing for the past 10 years, balances the fine line between both Nigerian and British cultures, which can be, at times, humorous, loving, self-reflective and uncomfortable.

Highlights include opening for Saul Williams and The Last Poets, with appearances at Yahoo! Wireless Festival, Latitude, Lovebox, Olympic Village, Sadler’s Wells Theatre as well as working with Channel 4 and BBC Radio 1xtra. He runs a successful monthly Poetry night in Shoreditch, he is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, he has had work commissioned by The Mayor’s Office, BBC World Service/ BBC Africa, various charities and was recently presented at the UN Humanitarian Summit by Gordon Brown.

Yomi founded BoxedIN in 2012, a quick fire, free Poetry night at Boxpark in Shoreditch. In 2014 he won a place on Nimble Fish’s RE: Play programme to begin developing his one-man show COAT.

Yomi was selected as 1 of 10 Poets to join The Complete Works in 2016. A national development programme for advanced Black and Asian writers. Past Alumni include Warsan Shire, Malika Booker, Inua Ellams and Karen McCarthy Woolf. He also travelled to New York City as part of British Council’s Shakespeare Lives initiative to read his work at the New York Public Library. He facilitated workshops in schools as well as read at various poetry spaces.

In 2017, Yomi premiered the full show of COAT at The Roundhouse, which amazingly sold out in 24hrs and has since toured nationally. Also adding to his list of achievements by being published in Rialto Magazine, Bare lit and 10: Poets of the New Generation, Bare Lit Anthology as well an essay contribution in SAFE: On Black British Men reclaiming space. In 2019, Yomi is one of three writers awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship.