The women of dub poetry and the spoken word

Cherry Natural (born Marcia Alrica Wedderburn in St Andrew) has performed dub poetry since 1979 and is regarded as Jamaica's leading female performance dub poet, publishing her debut collection Come Meck We Reason (1989) under the influence of Oku Onuora; she has twice won a JAMI Award and received the Mutabaruka Award for Best Spoken Word Poet at the 2019 IRAWMA.

Jean "Binta" Breeze (11 March 1956 - 4 August 2021) is recognized as the first woman to write and perform dub poetry. She moved to Kingston in 1978 and studied at the Jamaican School of Drama, where she met Michael "Mikey" Smith and Oku Onuora; she made her stage debut alongside Mutabaruka in 1981, who went on to record her work, including "Aid Travels with a Bomb," on the compilation album "Word Sound 'ave Power.".

Amina Blackwood-Meeks is a Jamaican storyteller, cultural scholar and custodian of the island's oral tradition, holding a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of the West Indies and directing the Culture in Education Programme in Jamaica's Ministry of Education; she founded Ntukuma, the Storytelling Foundation of Jamaica, and successfully petitioned for a National Storytelling Day.

Jamaican-born, Toronto-based dub poet who moved to Canada in 1974, released her debut recording Dub Poet in 1983, and won the Juno Award for Best Reggae/Calypso Recording for Revolutionary Tea Party (1986) and Conditions Critical (1988), later serving as Toronto’s seventh poet laureate.

Oku Onuora (born Orlando Wong, 1952, in Franklin Town, Eastern Kingston) is widely credited as the father of dub poetry. He began writing poetry in prison in 1971 while campaigning for prison reform, and in 1974 became the first inmate allowed to perform live with a reggae band. After his release in 1977 he took the name Oku Onuora and began performing alongside other poets, including Mutabaruka.

Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley (7 September 1919 - 26 July 2006), known universally as Miss Lou, was the writer who made Jamaican Patois a language you could publish in, broadcast in and be taken seriously in. She studied Jamaican folklore at Friends College in Highgate, and in 1945 became the first Black student admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London on a British Council scholarship — then spent six decades using that training on material the colonial curriculum had treated as beneath notice. Her collections run from Anancy Stories and Poems in Dialect (1944) through Jamaica Labrish (1966) to Auntie Roachy Seh (1993). She presented Miss Lou's Views on radio from 1965 and the children's programme Ring Ding on television from 1970 to 1982, on the conviction that children should be taught their own heritage; a generation grew up inside it. She was made MBE in 1960, received the Order of Jamaica in 1974, the Musgrave Medal in 1978 and the Order of Merit in 2001. The line from her to Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Yasus Afari is direct and acknowledged, and every deejay who ever chatted in Patois over a rhythm works in ground she cleared first. She died in Toronto.

Afua Cooper is a Jamaican-born historian and dub poet who emigrated to Canada and became a pioneering voice in the country's dub poetry and spoken-word movement, publishing her first collection Breaking Chains in 1983; she later earned a PhD in African-Canadian history, held the James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University, and served as Halifax's poet laureate (2018-2020).

Poetry written to be spoken over a reggae rhythm, or written with that rhythm already in it. The name is generally credited to Oku Onuora, and the form runs through Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, Michael Smith and Jean Binta Breeze — political, spoken in Jamaican language, and taking the deejay's relationship to a rhythm somewhere the dancehall was not going.