Community Engagement Work

Tice is passionate about community engagement as a means to directly work with people to create opportunities and changemaking new perspectives societally. She spent four years as Community Manager at Tilted Axis Press, a radical feminist press specialising in translation. She is a trustee for Poetry Translation Centre, consults for English PEN and facilitates workshops for various community projects.

‘I always aim to spotlight great storytellers in any discipline. I used to co-organise TEDxTalks UCL, booking inspirational women to talk about community change – such as Elif Shafak, and I was one of the original scouts for Sofar Sounds London – scouting artists such as Afronaut Zu, Lex Amor and Rachel Chinouriri.’

In 2022 she founded her interdisciplinary company (discovery vehicle, label, events platform and production company) Neoprene Genie. She curates and produces community events with an aim to platform experimental artists telling unique stories about growing up in ends, this includes Olivia Douglass (winner of the recent 4th Estate Prize), rapper M.I.C (Complex “One of a Kind”) and artists from her interdisciplinary collective Fwrdmtn, including Latekid and Kemanci. Through this, she has partnered with organisations such as Threads Radio, Tilted Axis, TANK Magazine and Reference Point.

Tice regularly teaches creative writing and interdisciplinary art practice, with an emphasis on music, experimental writing, sustainable approaches to a career in literature and writing on place. Tice has hosted lectures and taught creative writing at places like UCL, London Metropolitan University, Poetry School and for Spread the Word.
This is part of her practice with a leaning towards healthier ways to create, especially for working class people from the Global Majority who have been racialised as ethnic minorities. One of her favourite recent lectures was one on ‘loopholes in ends’, concerning the portals in a neighbourhood, citing from iconic artists such as CASisDEAD (as Castro Saint), Caleb Femi and Cleo Sol.

She has worked closely with writers development charities such as Spread the Word and Royal Society of Literature to judge literary prizes, including the Early Career Bursaries:

‘I cite the wisdom of people like Kit De Waal who once said that resilience shouldn’t be one of the most celebrated traits of the working class writer, as it is over-glorified and comes through unnecessary struggle. We need to have more opportunities like the Early Career Bursaries that offer sustained support for low income writers from underrepresented communities.’

Tice was invited by author Courttia Newland New Beacon Books, Serpentine Pavilion 2021 architect Sumayya Vally, and Serpentine to honour North London’s New Beacon Books’ commitment to publishing and distribution of works by Black and Asian writers. She took part in an evening of readings themed around constructing belonging and the history of places of resistance.

Tice judged the Early Career Bursaries recently, a prize aimed at working-class authors in need of extra support for their writing projects.

https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/projects/early-career-bursaries/

As part of her community management role at Tilted Axis, Tice organised and chaired numerous events with Asian writers at risk. Thisincluded an event with MeToo Asians, Asian Voices Europe and Shiori Ito on the 29th January 2022. It had been months in the planning, making schedules line-up and thinking of the safest and most comfortable way to have such a vital conversation. Award-winning journalist Shiori Ito, community innovators MeTooAsians and Asian Voices Europ spoke on the different ways we can affect change and alternative forms of protest against the insidious arms of structural inequality. Protest comes in many forms, not always in the ways we have come to expect. From the dissemination of information around sexual violence and misconduct to an unveiling of how fields such as journalism can improve their practice, the panel also touched on the different types of “protest’ within the #MeToo movement. The proceeds for these solidarity tickets went towards the works of MeTooAsians and Asian Voices Europe. This event was chaired by Tice Cin, writer and community manager of Tilted Axis, who published Shiori in the UK.