Publications
Please find below some of my publications:
Poetry
/ Collections
How to Wear a Skin
Louisa Adjoa Parker’s latest collection is an exploration of identity. Mostly set in South West England, Parker explores themes including place, race, friendship, motherhood, love, and loss, as well as what’s happening in society today. She takes inspiration from her own story and the imagined stories of others:- a boy at a train station; a woman with a tattoo; and weaves them together in her quest to understand our place in a beautiful, yet fractured world...
Salt-sweat & Tears
This largely autobiographical collection documents the life of a mixed-heritage child then woman through the 70s, 80s, 90s and noughties.
Blinking in the Light
A collection of confessional poems which, in starkly telling a story about a fraught pregnancy and the suicide of a man very close to the speaker's family, evokes with powerful images and unadorned language a raw sense of contemporary life.
(Currently Out of Stock)
/ Inclusion in Journals
- Under the Radar
- Ouroboros
- Coffee-House Poetry
- Envoi
- Several poems in Wasafiri
- Black Orchid and My grandmother at Greenham Common in Wasafiri
- How to be a good daughter and Butterfly in Bare Fiction
- Reach
- Sarasvati
/ Online Journals
- Dear White West Country People
- Five poems in Irisi Magazine
- Let the River Sing Quay Words poem
- Fireball in Ink, Sweat and Tears
- Yellow Sheets and Forest-child in And Other Poems
- Rag Doll (Highly Commended by the Forward Prize) in Amaryllis
- Three poems in Alliterati
- If I spin around and jump and shout in Peony Moon
- Poetry Space
- The Colverstone Review
- Disability Arts Online
- Those wild, pre-Brexit Days in Ink, Sweat and Tears
- I remember tasting salt: Interview and selection of poems in Irisi
/ Inclusion in anthologies
- Breaking Point in Live Canon 2016 Anthology
- Three poems in Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe)
- Sometimes (Cinnamon Press)
- Perhaps (Cinnamon Press)
- Rag Doll in The Forward Book of Poetry 2008
- A flower of flame in To Kingdom Come
- Velvet Dresses in Deepest Dorset
- His khaki Hood in Writing Motherhood
- Filigree
Fiction
/ Collections
A brand new collection by Louisa Adjoa Parker, published by Colenso Books in December 2020.
/ Online
- Good As Gold and This Dark City from PennyShorts
- Home by Tea-time in Token Magazine
- Butterflies in Toasted Cheese
- Red Cherries in The Pygmy Giant
- Pieces of Glass in Visual Verse
- Into the fire in Bare Fiction
- Of knives and men in Open Pen
- Short stories in issue 1, 2 and 3 of Token Magazine
/ Inclusion in anthologies
- Flash fiction in Consequences
- Bridges in Kissing Frankenstein & Other Stories
- Breaking Glass in Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories
- Good as Gold in Fresh Ink: New Light
/ Anthologies edited by Louisa
- Dorset Voices
- In search of sea glass
- We Black Men of England
Black, Asian & ethnically diverse history
Dorset's Hidden Histories
This booklet, published by Development Education in Dorset, explores the presence of African, Caribbean and Asian people in Dorset over four centuries. It looks at Dorset's links with the Transatlantic slave trade, the African American GIs who came to Dorset in the build up to D-Day, and contemporary stories of Dorset residents.
1944 We Were Here:
African American GIs in Dorset
'1944 We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset' explores the stories of the black soldiers who came to Dorset to train for D-Day. Told through the eyes of local people as well as the children of the GIs themselves, this is an important addition to Dorset's rich and diverse history. Here we discover stories of friendship, love, murder, racism and the segregation that was a fact of life in the US for African Americans at this time.
All Different, All Dorset
Celebrating multi-ethnic Dorset through images and stories
The World of East Dorset
This book contains stories of East Dorset children's family connections with the area and other parts of the globe, celebrating the diversity that is often found in rural parts of the UK.