For most of his childhood, he lived in Handsworth, a suburb of Birmingham with a heavy Afro-Caribbean and South Asian population that Zephaniah refers to as “the Jamaican capital of Europe” (Zephaniah 2017). He hated the study of poetry in school, finding it stiff, formal, and out of touch with modern life; however, the discovery of spoken word poetry changed his perspective. By the time he was a teenager, he had developed a reputation of heavy civically involved by frequently attending protests and rallies and speaking eloquently on local issues. These experiences impacted both his writing style and subject matter, and he weaves themes like identity and race into his spoken word poetry (Kay & Zephaniah 2012).