I began interning at HarperCollins when I was at university. I became increasingly political throughout my undergraduate degree. I started to conduct performances that interrogated my race and found myself more and more tokenised in majority white theatre spaces as “the Black girl”, making “Black work”. This drove me to start running events and thinking of different ways of curating content: creating politicised, diverse and challenging platforms that I would have liked to work in, rather than constantly problematising the spaces I had.
I became a part of Hysteria, a radical feminist collective, after I graduated. I got my first taste of actually editing the articles of academics, activists, artists and poets from around the world. I learnt on the job, with direction from the editor-in-chief and the rest of the editorial team, drawing on my experience at HarperCollins and as a writer. I needed to be a part of the move to change the increasingly Islamaphobic, racist and homophobic narratives churned out by the right-wing media, and self-publishing felt like one of the most liberating ways to do that. We relied on Kickstarter fundraising rather than Arts Council grants, meaning that we only had to prove ourselves to our readership and the international feminist community.