Chérie Taylor Battiste is a poet, playwright and a former TV researcher and actress. Early in her career she won a Norman Beaton Fellowship and project managed the embedding of creative learning in schools with CapeUK. Finding herself a lone parent of two, and as austerity hit, she returned to poetry, which she pursues as freedom, to share her experiences and as a rare opportunity to have an uncensored cultural voice. Her first collection Lioness was published by Valley Press in 2019.