Darren is a lecturer at University College London, having taught in primary schools for over twenty years. Darren has previously judged the Blue Peter, YA, CLiPPA, and Little Rebels book awards and the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award. He provided training for the Carnegie Kate Greenaway judges and advises on the CLPE Reflecting Realities research and Penguin / Runnymede Trust Lit in Colour project. Darren co-ordinated Power to the Pupils, a hip hop collective that produced 5 albums, written and recorded by primary school children in Hackney, London. In 2013, he established the UK HipHopEd Seminar Series for hip hop educators and artists, and the Philosophy for Cyphers course, incorporating hip hop pedagogy and philosophy for children. Darren contributed to the best-selling book The Good Immigrant (Unbound) with a chapter entitled ‘You Can’t Say That! Stories Have to Be About White People’. For younger readers, Darren co-authored, with Jeffrey Boakye, What Is Masculinity? Why Does It Matter? And Other Big Questions (Wayland) and contributed to The Mab: Eleven Epic Stories from the Mabinogi edited by Matt Brown and Eloise Williams. Since 2018, he has written a regular column for Books for Keeps with Professor Karen Sands O’Connor examining Black & racially minoritised characters in children’s literature, entitled 'Beyond the Secret Garden'. A book based on the column will be published by the English Media Centre in 2024.