Jay Bernard is a writer, film programmer and archivist from London. They are the film programmer for BFI Flare, London’s LGBT film festival, an archivist at Statewatch, and editor at Oxford Poetry, one of the oldest dedicated poetry magazines in the world. Bernard has authored three pamphlets - The Red and Yellow Nothing (2016), English Breakfast (2013), and Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (2008) - and was part of the original ‘Speaking Volumes Breaking Ground’ tours to the USA which showcased the best Black British writers from the UK. In 2016, Bernard was Poet-in-Residence at the George Padmore Institute, out of which came Surge (2019), their first full-length poetry collection, based on the New Cross Fire of 1981 where 14 young black people lost their lives. Surge won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award, the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Their interdisciplinary practice is rooted in documentary, archives and social history.