In her post about Naomi Cambell,
aulelia mentioned Benjamin Zephaniah. Having never heard of Benjamin Zephaniah, I googled his name and found this information from his Wikipedia page:

"Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (born 15 April 1958, Birmingham, England) is a British Rastafarian writer and dub poet. He is a well-known figure in contemporary English literature, and was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008.[1]

Zephaniah has said that his mission is to fight the dead image of poetry in academia, and to "take [it] everywhere" to people who do not read books.

Zephaniah was born and raised in Handsworth district of Birmingham, [3] which he called the "Jamaican capital of Europe", the son of a Barbados postman and a nurse.[2][4] As a dyslexic, he attended an approved school but left aged 13 unable to read or write.[4]

He writes that his poetry emerged from the rhythms for Jamaica and "street politics". His first performance was in church when he was ten, and by the age of fifteen, his poetry was already known among Handsworth's Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities.[5] He received a criminal record with the police as a young man and served a prison sentence for burglary.[4][6] Tired of preaching only to black people about their own lives, he decided to expand his audience, and headed to London at the age of twenty-two.[2]

Rejection of OBE
In November 2003, Zephaniah wrote in The Guardian that he had turned down an OBE from the Queen because it reminded him of "how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised."[7]

Charitable work
He is an honorary patron of The Vegan Society,[8], Viva![9] (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals)the anti-racist organisation Newham Monitoring Project, and Tower Hamlets Summer University"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Zephaniah