Christian Foley makes it up as he goes along. His freestyles have taken him from the school classroom to Oprah's Television Networks and PMQ's at Westminster, from the festival circuit to TED talks and the Premier League.
Christian is a writer, rapper and a teacher – all at once. His interactive freestyles and improvised performances, lauded by stars like 50 Cent and creator of Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda, have gone viral multiple times and made him a regular on television and radio, amassing over thirty million views worldwide and features across British and international press.
Christian is one of the only few poets in the world selected to complete a ‘Spoken Word Education Programme’ and Teaching MA at Goldsmiths University, an incentive which was created to transform professional poets into specialised facilitators. Over the last decade, Christian has worked with thousands of children, and hundreds of teachers every year, visiting primary and secondary schools and delivering workshops for staff and students. He also works in a number of schools and alternative provisions in East London, as a permanent Poet in Residence. Christian is the editor of, to date, fourteen poetry anthologies written by the young people he teaches. Christian studies a PhD in ‘Hip Hop Education’ at Goldsmiths University and is an expert on incorporating rap into the process of learning.
Outside of the classroom, in the field of music, Christian has released two rap albums Excommunication and Happy Hour which focus on mental health. Christian has a live one-man stage show called Thirty-Year-Old White Rapper and has also released numerous instrumental Hip-Hop projects, under the artist name jam(e)s.
As an author, Christian’s debut picture book The Oddsocktopus, featuring his trademark tongue twisting rhymes, bringing Hip-Hop to the page, is out now in stores. He is currently working on the follow up.
