Mbasa Sigcau, also known as Amazing the Slum Intellect, is a 20 year old emcee, poet and observer based in Grahamstown South Africa. He honed his writing style by studying the Durban underground rap scene. Most of his writing is deeply rooted in social commentary.
Thandi Sliepen is a self taught artist living in the Eastern Free State. Born in 1971 in Mowbray, Cape Town she left South Africa in 1976 and immigrated with her family to New Zealand where she completed her formal education.
In 1990 she farewelled the antipodes and returned to Africa, first to Tanzania for 8 months and then back to her roots in South Africa. In 1992 Thandi met artist Martin Wessels and the stage was set for a life of Art. She moved into a cave on Martin’s property and started painting, sculpting and continued to write poetry prolifically.
Since then Thandi has lived and exhibited in various places around South Africa, New Zealand and the Netherlands. Thandi currently lives on a farm outside Ladybrand with her partner, photographer Glen Green and their two children.
Thandi’s website is www.glengreen.co.za/thandi
Andile Nayika was born and raised in Grahamstown, South Africa. He was first introduced to storytelling and poetry by his late grandmother. He has published his works in various poetry publications like Oppikoppi’s Ons Klyntj. He has also written for media houses such as the Mail & Guardian in Johannesburg. He is a founding member of the Writers Movement, which collaborates with the Rhodes University English Department to produce the Cycle of Knowledge.
Dan Wylie teaches English at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He has published two books on the Zulu leader Shaka (Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka and Myth of Iron: Shaka in History, both UKZN Press); a memoir; Dead Leaves: Two Years in the Rhodesian War (UKZN Press); and several volumes of poetry. Most recently, he has concentrated on Zimbabwean literature and on ecological concerns in literature. He founded the annual Literature & Ecology Colloquium in 2004, and edited the collection of essays, Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa (Cambridge Scholars Press). His latest publications are Elephant and Crocodile, both in the Reaktion Books animals series, and Slow Fires (poems with etchings by Roxandra Britz; Fourthwall Books).
Robert Berold has published four collections of poetry and four books of non-fiction. As editor of New Coin from 1989 to 1999, he sought out and published much of the groundbreaking new poetry being written in that period, later editing a selection of these into the anthology It All Begins. He has edited over 40 books by South African poets, several of them published under his Deep South imprint. For most of his working life he has been a rural development worker and a freelance editor of technical books. Currently he coordinates the MA programme in creative writing at Rhodes University.
Stephen Symons is a former lecturer, graphic designer and poet. His poetry has been published in journals (including: New Contrast, Carapace, New Coin, Prufrock, Aerodrome, Umlanga ) and various anthologies. He holds a Masters in Creative Writing from UCT and is currently busy with a PhD in African Studies. He lives in Oranjezicht with his wife and two children.
Marike Beyers lives in Grahamstown, where she spends most of her time surrounded by books, papers, the buzz of internet pages. Balance is a difficult thing, as is the wind. She gets herself tangled up in letters and does not drive. On the other hand, she says, “Thunderstorms are magnificent beings. And then there is poetry that reaches into stillness.” Her collection of poems, On Another Page, was published with Aerial Publishing in 2011.
Thabiso Malepe is the co founder of Slum Literature,an audio visual poetry experience that fuses Slam Poetry with Hip Hop. It is rooted in social consciousness and seeks to tell the stories and illustrate the brilliance of where it originated, the township.
Pakama Mlokoti, born on May 12 1994 in Mthatha, is currently based in Port Elizabeth pursuing a career in poetry. She is a writer, peformer and film maker in progress.
Pakama began competitive poetry in 2013 winning the Candlelight slam and Consent is Sexy Poetry slam. She also came second place on the Udubs Got Talent finals.
She has performed at various stages across the country including the Inzync Sessions in Cape Town, the Word N Sound stage in Johannesburg as well as Atheneaum Little Theatre in Port Elizabeth.
She also represented Eastern Cape in the National Slam For Your Life finals at the Soweto theatre where she won and is current a National Slam Champion.
Stuart Thembisile Lewis is a journalist and filmmaker who moonlights as a poet. He was born in 1993, less than a year before South Africa’s first democratic election, and carries a massive chip on his shoulder for consistently being lumped together with the so-called ‘Born Frees’. He spends most of his time stuffing around on the internet
Jeannie Wallace McKeown writes poetry and prose creatively; works at a desk in a university but has also been a freelance writer for the past six years covering academic lectures, seminars, book launches and interviewing interesting people; has had creative pieces published in literary journals and online; mother of two boys who can no longer be described as small; in a steady co-parenting relationship with an ex-husband, resolutely single and using poetry as one means of meeting this life head-on.
Xolisa Ngubelanga born in Port Elizabeth is a playwright, actor and director responsible for the underground hit – Dinner with Bantu. He has a passion for availing the artistic experience for the marginalized from mainstream art outlets and is currently establishing a vibrant township theatre culture in Nelson Mandela Bay.
Founder of Mdali – a program to revive critical cultural activities among the youth in New Brighton. The program is to stimulate audience development for the arts through early exposure of the arts to the youth and empowers youth to become catalysts of community art experiences through creative and critical writing.
Jane Berg is a photojournalist, poet, and writer, working in Grahamstown, South Africa. She is currently completing her degree in Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University. She majored in English and is a member of the Cycle of Knowledge Performance Poetry Group. She was awarded the Keven Carlean Scholarship for Academic Achievement in Journalism for 2013, and first place for the 2015 Foto Fence Competition, Portrait Category. Her work is concerned with gender and environmental issues. Born in Brazil and raised between England and South Africa, her accent confuses most people. Her poetry is a way to, as Rilke said, “live the questions” of identity and belonging.
Ntsika Tyatya is a writer, poet, spoken word performer who is from Nelson Mandela Bay, he has been active in the poetry scene for the past 12 years. After co-producing weekly poetry sessions in Port Elizabeth in 2006, he created SLAM ( Student’s Literature and Arts Movement) in 2008, which was the first slam poetry society at Cape Peninsula University of Technology. He was the headliner and finalist in the Cape Town poets search competition, Poetry Delight, as well as a headliner at the East London weekly poetry sessions; Brute Force. 2012 he was one of the headlining poets at the National Book Week. He has graced the stages with Luka Lesson (AUS), Lesego Rampolokeng, Lebo Mashile, Ntsiki Mazwai, Bongeziwe Mabandla, Don Mattera, Afurakhan, The Brother Moves on, Zubz, Mxo, Tumi to name few. In 2014 he partnered with Word and Sound, as the Eastern Cape facilitator in their Slam Your Life national competition that was held in Grahamstown.
He currently pursues a BA in Corporate Communication and has assisted with conceptualising both Maxhosa exhibitions in 2013 and 2014. He was part of the company that assisted in bringing Ian Kamau (Canada), Tutu Puoane (Holland) Vatiswa Ndara (SA), to Nelson Mandela Bay. He freelances in communication for various artists and businesses.
Deborah Seddon is an academic and a poet who was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, but is now based in Grahamstown, South Africa, where she teaches South African, African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and English Renaissance literature in the Rhodes University English Department. Her academic research is focused on South African orature and the transnational aesthetics of spoken word poetry. She is a founding member of the Cycle of Knowledge, a poetry organization consisting of students, school learners, and poets from the local community. The Cycle of Knowledge was created in 2013, and is a community engagement partnership between the Rhodes University English Department and the Writers’ Movement: a group of poets located in Joza, Grahamstown. The weekly sessions of the Cycle of Knowledge alternate between meetings on campus and in Joza, and provide a range of educational activities around writing, reading, and performing poetry. These include discussions of the work of South African and international poets, creative writing exercises, poetry ciphers and open mike sessions, editing and group feedback sessions on individual works, performances on campus, in town, and at local schools, recording poetry in video formats, collating biographies of the poets involved, and documenting the group’s activities.
Since 2006, Deborah has been a member of Aerial Publishing, a self-financing community publishing project based in Grahamstown, which received its start-up funding from the Centre for the Book in Cape Town. The committee annually calls for manuscripts of poetry and prose, mainly from Grahamstown writers, and chooses two per year to publish. Aerial Publishing edits, designs, and prints all their publications themselves, using funds raised by the sales of their books.
Deborah has published academic papers on South African literature and orature, African-American literature, South African engagements with Shakespeare, and on pedagogy in post-apartheid South Africa. Some of her poems appear in Writing From Here and Aerial.
Rosamund Stanford grew up on a farm in East Griqualand, South Africa, and studied literature, history and politics at Cape Town University. She has worked as a script writer and an editor in education and IT publishing, and is now a contract writer and editor. She has written non-fiction books about HIV and short fiction. Her poetry has appeared in New Coin, in the anthology In the Heat of Shadows – South African poetry 1996-2013, and has been translated into French. Her collections of poems are The Peeling of Skies (Aerial Publishing 2004) and The Hurricurrent (Deep South 2011).
Azola Dayile is a spoken-word poetry artist, literature scholar and all-round lover of the word. He hails from the streets of KwaZakhele in the windy city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa where he was born and bred for the past 20-something-odd-years.
His passion for reading and writing emanated from a very young age, having been involved in spelling and reading groups and contests from the tender age of seven years. However, it is only in high school that he became conscious of his writing and that is when he formally began writing poetry, even though never sharing it beyond his immediate peers.
In 2012 he joined the Culture Consciousness Society, hoping to grow his craft and become better at what he had been doing for some time.
All thanks to the universal forces of attraction, Azola met with up two fellow artists in Sisonke Papu and Unathi Slasha, with whom he co-founded and launched the Resonance Poetry Movement society at NMMU in March 2013.
His has since performed both inside and outside the Eastern Cape, has been published in local journals (also due to be published in the June .issue of the New Coin) and has had his worked featured on Radio L2K, a community radio station based in Uitenhage.
Megan van der Nest was born and raised in Johannesburg and currently lives in Grahamstown, where she is a postgraduate student at Rhodes University, working towards a PhD in English Literature. She holds two Masters Degrees, one in Philosophy and one in Creative Writing. She has worked as a Philosophy lecturer at the University of Fort Hare, and as a facilitator for the annual creative writing course offered by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. She studied music as an undergraduate and was a member of the East Cape Opera Company for two years. She now sings with the Rhodes University Chamber Choir. Her poetry has been published in New Coin, Aerial and ITCH Online, and her poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rhino (after Wallace Stevens) was included in the 2012 anthology For Rhino in a Shrinking World, edited by Harry Owen. The inspiration for her poetry is drawn from simple moments of family life and from the natural world.
Lesedi Thwala is a 20-year-old female, born in Itsoseng but grew up in a small town called Lichtenburg in the North West Province. She is currently doing her first year of her Bachelor of Arts at Rhodes University. A die-hard feminist, Motswako rapper and recovering book worm, Lesedi’s love for poetry began as an escape from the challenges she faced in life until a friend discovered one of her poems and forced her to recite it for a group of people. Lesedi is passionate about South African literature and dreams of becoming an author someday.
Sisonkepapu is a dynamic personality. Close observers of his work claim that he has a provocative poetic skill and has established himself as a prominent poetic voice within the Eastern Cape. Being a professor of literature, his focus extends beyond the academy and community, and has a penchant for critical engagement through writing and development of budding writers like himself. His poem was added into the syllabus for a Poetry course at NMMU in 2014 and 2015, and offered his insights into the critical revelation in the piece, and the art of poetic writing and literary interpretation in the Poetry lectures. The Resonance Poetry Movement, a poetry society he co-founded, facilitates creative writing workshops and has published an anthology, hosted local and International acts such as Ian Kamau and Luka Lesson.
Crystal Warren grew up in Port Elizabeth but now lives in Grahamstown where she works at the National English Literary Museum. She has edited New Coin poetry magazine and taught a creative writing course. In-between she manages to occasionally do some writing of her own.
Mishka Hoosen was born in Johannesburg and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. She is currently completing an MA in Anthropology, with particular focus on gender, sexuality, violence, and embodiment theory. She has a love of Cohiba cigars, airplane rides, Ancient Greek, and soda floats. Her book of nonfiction, Hollow the Bones, is forthcoming from Deep South Books in August 2015.
Allan Kolski Horwitz grew up in Cape Town. Between 1974 and 1985 he lived in the Middle East, Europe and North America, returning to live in Johannesburg in 1986. Since then he has worked in the trade union and social housing movements. He continues to be a writer in various genres as well as being an educator and activist. He is a member of the Botsotso Jesters poetry performance group and of the Botsotso Publishing editorial board.
His books of poetry are entitled Saving Water and There are Two Birds at My Window; in addition he has been published widely in various anthologies such as We Jive like This, Dirty Washing and Essential Things. His short fiction is contained in three collections: Un/common Ground, Out of the Wreckage and Meditations of a Non-White White. He has also written a children’s parable entitled Blue Wings and five plays, The Pump Room, Comrade Babble, Boykie and Girlie, Jerico and Book Marks.
Wandile Ganya grew up in Western Cape South Africa. He is currently a student at the University of Stellenbosch. He started writing poetry at a very young age, he enjoys both classic and contemporary poetry, and also has a keen interest in philosophy
His first collection of poems titled Divine Interspace is available as an ebook on Amazon, Kalahari, Exclusive books, and GoodBooks.
Phomelelo Mamampi Moshapo is a lover of words. Her poetry has been published in various volumes of the Timbila Poetry Project. She has contributed to an anthology of poetry by South African Women, Basadzi Voices (UKZN Press, 2006). She also published a Sepedi collection of poetry titled Peu tša tokologoIo (Timbila, 2005). She was also one of the featured poets in Throbbing Ink 2003, a poetry collection by six South African poets.
She has read her poetry on various stages including the following: Polokwane Literary Fair 2014, 95 Poems 95 Poets Long Live Madiba, Polokwane Literary Festival 2012, Poetry Africa 2007, and Grahamstown National Arts Festival 2005, as well as the Beyond Borders Literature Festival in Uganda 2005. Her writing is mainly social commentary.
She’s a mother to Gaositwe, Mukona, and Muwanwa; wife to Segopotso Moshapo; and she holds a degree in physiotherapy
Born in Kagiso, raised in Diepkloof, polished in Scummyside and studying in Cape Town. Thabiso is a self proclaimed wordsmith exploring the multiverse one syllable at a time.
Myesha Jenkins writes and performs poetry. Her second collection, Dreams of Flight, was launched in 2011 at UKZN’s prestigious, international festival, Poetry Africa, where she also performed. Her first collection, Breaking the surface was published by Timbila in 2005. Her work can also be found in We Are (Penguin, 2010) and Isis X (Botsotso, 2006). Myesha has been interviewed in the print media and on radio and TV.
For the last three years, she has produced Poetry in the Air to celebrate Women’s Month on SAfm. She also co-hosts the Jozi House of Poetry, a non-competitive, woman-friendly monthly poetry session.
In 2013 , Myesha won the Mbokodo Award for Women in the Arts in the Poetry category
She also runs writing workshops for women and girls, stimulating creativity and imagination. Myesha is currently co-editing South Africa’s first erotic poetry anthology. Also, a CD is in the pipeline.
Feminist, immigrant, activist, she generously shares her life, reflections and vision. She has been on stages with Napo Masheane, Lebo Mashile, Ntsiki Mazwai, Natalia Molebatsi, Gabeba Baderoon, Antonio Lyons, Phillippa DeVillers, Vonani Bila, Khosi Xaba and Khethi Ntshangase
She has lived and worked in Johannesburg since 1993 when she relocated from California.
Ashraf Booley is a young poet from Cape Town whose love for writing birthed at the age of sixteen. He works as a digital content producer by day, where he keeps his other passion alive – food. His poetry has featured in a handful of anthologies and his tenacity has seen him recite poetry alongside two of his favourite poets – Rustum Kozain and Gabeba Baderoon. Ashraf writes to challenge oppressive institutions, as a form of catharsis, expression and firmly believes in poetry as a medium to voice the voices of those who have been silenced.
Darren Carolissen was born and raised in Stellenbosch, South Africa. He started writing at the age of 13. He started writing lyrics and eventually found his way to poetry. Since then he has been chasing this form of storytelling with a fierce passion.
Anna is a mother, a yoga and art teacher who runs writing workshops and self growth courses. One of her passions is counselling and she sees life as a spiritual journey. Her poetry has been published in various literary magazines including: COSAW Gauteng Cultural letter, HerStoria Volume 1 NO. 3, Something Quarterly Volume 2 No 4, New Coin, Ear, Bleksem. Botsotso Contemporary Cultural Magazine. Anthologies which published her poetry- We Jive Like this, Dirty Washing, IsisX [Botsotso Publishing], Like a House on ire [Cosaw].
She recently completed a Self Growth Workbook, Walking the Labyrinth which has not yet been published. She has participated in various poetry readings and performances.
Dumisane Magagula is an accomplished poet based in Mpumalanga, South Africa. His debut poetry recital was in 1981 at a funeral, he has since then performed his work at innumerable stages including at government events. His new poetry album is titled Ngitawuvela. He gets immense gratification from mentoring young writers.