Victoria I. Ekpo is a lecturer in Secondary English Education and a final-year PhD student at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk. Her research centres around questions of authenticity – the self and their ontology – and ways in which poetry provides space and opportunities for the critical processes and articulation of the self. Victoria has more than 22 years of expertise in teaching, curriculum development and teacher education. She is a co-convenor for the BERA Philosophy of Education special interest group. Victoria is also a writer and a poet, and her recent publications include the collection 'Ask for Wings that Fly (Book Leaf publishing, 2023), poems ‘Late’, in the collection Places of Poetry and ‘Yoga with the black mothers’ group’, published in the anthology Where We Find Ourselves: Writing the Diaspora. Her paper on poetic inquiry won best paper at BERA 2022, in the Arts-based research special interest group. Her new poetry collection 'Ask for wings that fly' is widely available.