Joel McKerrow is a performance poet, writer, educator, youth worker, thinker and activist. He is an active spoken word poet, featuring at many different poetry nights around Melbourne and in 2010 placed second in the finals of the Melbourne Overload Poetry Slam and represented at the Victorian State Final of the Australian Poetry Slam. Last year he released his first book, Beyond Rhetoric – Writings in the Tradition of Kahlil Gibran and he is the co-founder of the ‘Centre for Poetics and Justice’, a not-for-profit organisation focussed on literary education and social awareness for marginalised teenagers (www.cpj.org.au).Vocationally, he has been a youth worker for the last 10 years and is currently on Faculty at Tabor College Victoria, where he lectures in youth work and runs a transitional year for school leavers. He is passionate about discovering a new way to live outside the system of the Empire of Greed and spends much of his time trying to match his actions with this belief.