Nii Ayikwei Parkes (; born 1 April 1974), born in the United Kingdom to parents from Ghana, where he was raised, is a performance poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is one of 39 writers aged under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa who in April 2014 were named as part of the Hay Festival's prestigious Africa39 project. He writes for children under the name K.P. Kojo. Biography Born in the UK while his parents were studying there, Nii Parkes was raised from the age of three or four in Ghana, where he was educated at Achimota School. His first editorial role was in 1988 working on his school magazine, The Achimotan, and he went on to co-found, at the age of 17, filla! magazine, Ghana's first student-run national magazine. Parkes subsequently studied in England at Manchester Metropolitan University. While there, he emerged as a performance poet and was also a member of the Black Writer's Group of Commonword. He was children's poet-in-residence at the Brighton Festival in 2007. A veteran of several poetry festivals, and former poet-in-residence at the Poetry Café in London, he has performed poetry in the United Kingdom, Europe, Ghana and the United States and was a 2005 Associate Artist-In-Residence with BBC Radio 3. In 2007 he was British Council writer-in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles and became one of the youngest living writers (along with Owen Sheers and Choman Hardi) featured in the Poems on the Underground programme in London with his poem "Tin Roof". Parkes runs regular workshops in the UK and set up a Writer's Fund in Ghana to promote writing among the country's youth. He has recorded two CDs of his spoken-word poetry, Incredible Blues and Nocturne of Phrase, and has published three chapbooks of poetry – eyes of a boy, lips of a man, M is for Madrigal, and the self-published Shorter!, which was put together to raise money for the Writers' Fund initiative. He is also the co-founder (in 2002) and Senior Editor at flipped eye publishing, for whom he has edited fourteen two (editor), Dance the Guns to Silence (co-editor with Kadija Sesay) and x-24: unclassified (co-editor with Tash Aw). Parkes' short stories can be found in Tell Tales: Volume I (Tell Tales) and The Mechanics' Institute Review (Birkbeck College) and an excerpt from his second fiction manuscript, Afterbirth, was featured in the New Writing 15 anthology published by