Jay Hulme
Self Employed
Performance poet, workshop leader, public speaker, and educator.

Jay Hulme is a transgender award-winning poet, performer, speaker and educator from Leicester, Winner of Slambassadors 2015, and finalist in the 2016 Roundhouse Poetry Slam. He has recently branched out into children’s poetry, and his work was Highly Commended in the 2018 CLiPPA Awards. Alongside his writing and regular performances, he teaches in schools, works as an Inclusion Ambassador for Inclusive Minds, promoting inclusion and diversity in children’s publishing, and doing sensitivity reads to ensure depictions of trans people in books are both accurate and inoffensive. He also consults and speaks at events and conferences on the importance of diversity in the media, and more specifically transgender inclusion and rights. His new book is Clouds Cannot Cover Us (Published October 2019 Age: Teen YA ISBN 9781912745104. 96 pages. Pbk £7.99) The poems have been carefully selected to chart Jay’s journey from growing up in a working-class family in Leicestershire to his feelings and thoughts about school life and his experience As Jay says himself: “When it was decided that this collection would be for teenagers I was left with this determination, that this collection wouldn’t speak down to anyone, that the world I portrayed within it would be the world we live in, that there would be no attempt to make reality “appropriate for children”. People seem to forget that teenagers live in the same world as everyone else, and they face the same struggles adults face every day. Teenagers deal with racism and sexism and disability and poverty and so much more that we don’t even see.”