Author Jade LB will join safeguarding expert Jahnine Davis in conversation to mark two decades since her creation Keisha the Sket, first captivated young readers.
Date: 5 June 2025
On Thursday 12 June, London Metropolitan University will host a landmark literary event as Jade LB, the once-anonymous author of Keisha the Sket, marks 20 years since her groundbreaking story first reshaped the cultural landscape of Black British youth.
The public event, hosted by the university’s Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (CWASU), will take place at 5.30pm in the Roding Building on London Met’s Holloway Road Campus.
Joining Jade LB in conversation will be Jahnine Davis, director of Listen Up, an organisation dedicated to amplifying marginalised children’s voices.
A cultural landmark
In 2005, at the age of 13, Jade began publishing chapters of Keisha the Sket, then titled Keisha Da Sket, on the social blogging platform Piczo. The story, told in the voice of its teenage protagonist Keisha, was raw, relatable, and unapologetically honest. It was passed from phone to phone, printed out and shared in classrooms, and quoted across social media platforms - it went viral before that was even a term.
Emerging long before mainstream publishers or literary critics embraced stories of working-class Black girls, Keisha the Sket became a sensation and cultural touchstone. It was one of the first examples of youth-authored digital storytelling in the UK, laying early foundations for what would now be recognised as “online culture” and the democratisation of authorship. For years, the identity of the writer remained a mystery, until Jade LB, a pseudonym, was revealed in Stormzy’s Mel Made Me Do It music video in 2022, following formal publication of Keisha the Sket by #Merky Books in 2021.
The published edition includes a reflective foreword in which Jade, now a London-based academic and co-lead of Learning Development in the School of Social Sciences and Professions at London Met, describes herself as “in recovery” from deeply internalised misogyny. She reflects on how these internal beliefs influenced her writing, relationships, and worldview, offering readers a powerful lens through which to understand the narrative.
Details
Date: Thursday 12 June 2025.
Time: 5.00pm entry for a 5.30pm start. There will be refreshments - juice, water, wine.
Location: Room TMG-47
Ground Floor of Roding Building (use the Rocket Building entrance),
London Metropolitan University, 166-220 Holloway Rd, London N7 8DB.
About the presenter
Jahnine Davis is widely recognised for her research into adultification bias in child protection. She serves as the Department for Education’s National Kinship Care Ambassador and was the lead reviewer of It’s Silent, the first national safeguarding report to centre race and racism in child protection. She holds an MA in Woman and Child Abuse, a course which is run by the CWASU Team, and was recently honoured with a named scholarship at Durham University.