Zena Edwards has been played on NTS shows including Plastic Language, with In Other Words first played on 19 March 2025.

Zena Edwards has been involved in performance for 18 years – as a singer/musician, poet and stage-manager after graduating from Middlesex University. She has been a performance poet since 1998, performing, professionally and facilitating workshops in poetry and creative writing since 2002.

Raised in Tottenham, North London, Zena has become known as one the ‘new generation’ of female performance poets to come out of London and was nominated for the Arts Foundation Award for performance Poetry 2007. She has toured extensively round the UK and Europe supported by the Apples and Snakes poetry organisation, 57 Productions and the British Council and has shared the stage and anthologies with some of her most admired predecessors Linton Kwesi Johnson, Sonia Sanchez, Lemn Sissay, Jean Binta Breeze and Roger Mcgough.

Zena defines the fusion of poetry and music by including traditional African-instrumentation to compliment her mellifluous singing and spoken voice. She reaches internationally diverse cultural and inter-generational audiences and fuses jazzy Hip-Hop grooves heavily influenced by her world music collaborations.