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ABOUT KARIM HARVEY

“Very naughty, but good at poetry” is how Karim Harvey's primary school teacher described him. In the years since then, Karim has become an accomplished poet whose writing practice, in his own words, “heeds the decline of moral ambition, isolation and creative inclusion.”

 

A recurring theme in his work is that of being of mixed-race. Born to birth parents he's never met, Karim was adopted by a white middle class family. “I can still remember the signs on the storefront windows where they raised me in Essex,” he recalls: “No Irish/No Blacks/No Dogs.” He was also subject to repeated abuse from his adoptive family, resulting in the psychological trauma that also figures prominently in his writing. “I consider my poetry as my therapy,” says Karim. “If you have an emotional problem? Write it.” He also addressed his experience as a transgendered person. “I knew at age 5 that I was a boy. I was diagnosed as gender dysphoric back then. It's a term that's still used, but thankfully these days it's a medical rather than psychiatric diagnosis. And I'm post-op, done and dusted.”

 

Karim's work has been published by Forward Press, Centre For Better Health, and Rethink Your Mind. With Taking the Michelangelo his first poetry collection, Karim provides a vital voice to a world that under-represents the complexity and diversity of human experience on the planet.

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