Louisa Adjoa Parker was born of Ghanaian and English heritage and has spent much of her life in Dorset, a county whose landscape and histories run through her work as both setting and subject. That rootedness in a place not conventionally associated with Black British life shapes what she writes about and why she writes it.
Her first pamphlet, *Salt-sweat and Tears* (2007), established her as a poet attentive to the body, to inheritance, and to the quiet weight of experience that sits outside dominant narratives. *Blinking in the Light* followed in 2016, developing her signature compression and her interest in how identity is carried — in skin, in gesture, in the objects people make and leave behind. Work from these collections attracted attention across UK poetry competitions, earning longlists and shortlists including recognition in the Forward Prize.
“In 2018, Hercules Editions published *Kindred*, a pamphlet that paired her poems with archival photographs and documents recording Black presence in Dorset.”
The project made visible a history that many readers had not known existed and demonstrated what her poetry does at its most purposeful: it recovers, it names, and it insists on complexity where erasure has been the default. "The Jewellery Maker," one of the poems from *Kindred*, was selected for the AQA *Worlds and Lives* GCSE anthology, bringing her work into secondary school classrooms across England.
*How to Wear a Skin* (Indigo Dreams, 2019), her first full-length collection, gathers and extends these concerns. The title announces the central preoccupation: what it means to inhabit a mixed-heritage identity in Britain, to be visibly and invisibly Black, to negotiate the daily textures of belonging and exclusion. The poems work in plain, precise language that trusts the image over the argument.