Newman Sigenu

Newman Sigenu was born in Fort Beaufort, South Africa. It is in Fort Beufort where he qualified as a teacher, taught in primary school and was later promoted to be Headmaster.

Under the mentorship of Dr. M.M.M Duka, he co-wrote poetry series called Isihobe se-Afrika. He lends his time at community uplifting projects and is a member of the Writers Association in Chris Hani Disctrict.

Ndukwe Onuoha

Ndukwe Onuoha resides in Lagos Nigeria, where he is a copywriter by day and poet by design. He draws his inspiration from the many human stories that play themselves out every day, providing a unique insight into the animal called man.

He is married to a lovely blogger, who also has the rather arduous task of keeping him within the agreeable bounds of reality and sanity

Natasha Tafari

Natasha Tafari considers herself a Hip Hop poet and is driven by her observance of life. She feels that artists serve as a medium of expressing the spiritual essence of life through various creative mediums. Poets express with Words, Expression and Resonance. Natasha Tafari is also a singer, songwriter, scriptwriter, emcee and events manager.

Natasha has organized her own events including Wordsworthsaying (2010), Hip hop custodians and Community jam. She has facilitated workshops at the Grahamstown festival, Artscape theatre in Cape Town and the Language commission. She has performed across venues in Cape Town including the Sparkling Women’s Gathering, WordsWorthSaying Raga’zzi, Verses and the former Badilisha’s Fireword Fridays.

Napo Masheane

Embodying the energy of a young, urban South African generation, acclaimed proponent of spoken-word poetry, Napo Masheane is a fresh and innovative voice in this genre. Born in Soweto and raised in Qwaqwa, Masheane who holds a Marketing Management and Speech and Drama Diploma, is a writer, director, producer, poet and an acclaimed performer on both international and national stages.

She is a founding member of Feela Sista! Spoken Word Collective. She is also the co-director of Colour of the Diaspora, an international collective of black women from the United States and South Africa. Masheane was a nominee of the 2005 Daimler Chrysler South African Poetry Award and has studied at or worked in: the Market Theatre, the Windybrow Theatre, the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, the University of Johannesburg, the Civic Theatre (Actors Centre), the SABC, Fuba School of Dramatic Arts, the University of California, Jungel Theater (Germany), Soweto Youth Drama Society, Farnebo College (Sweden), and The Lion King (New York City).

She has performed at Maitisong Theatre in Botswana and the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA). Masheane is currently the Managing Director of her own production company Village Gossip Productions through which she self-published her poetry and essay anthology Caves Speak In Metaphors. Her provocative and humorous one woman show My Bum Is Genetic Deal with It was received to wide acclaim.

She has performed and shared stage with, amongst others, Don Mattera, Lebo Mashile, Kgafela Magogodi, Jessica Care Moore, Toni Blackman and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Nana Yaw Sarpong

Nana Yaw Sarpong is a poet, writer, radio presenter and producer of Writers Project on Citi, a weekly literary radio programme for Ghanaian writers. He currently works with the Writers Project of Ghana. Nana Yaw lives in Ghana where he teaches English and Linguistics.

Nana Korantema Hanson

Nana Korantema Hanson is an actress, a writer (poetry, anecdotal essays, and novel), blogger, television presenter, and an entertainment journalist based in Ghana.

Nama Xam

Pseudonyms: Nama Xam ( Xam – pronounced Gam / Jy7even (Pronounced – Jey sev-uhn) / Syllabic / isja! /
! Ga re’ (Listen)

With charged lyrics reflecting and animating the experiences of a young Khoe Khoen and Bushman (1st indigenous people of sub Saharan Africa) trying to survive within a marginalising system, this is the Poetry and music of Nama Xam.

Nama Xam has always been into music one way or the other. Since a young age he has been receiving instruction in classical piano, later moving to Jazz and at this time being influenced by the urban music revolution happening within the ghettos of the Cape Flats. He recalls,” I was introduced to Hip Hop through the dubbed cassettes my brother had featuring artists such as Public Enemy, X clan, LL Cool J, NWA. I was hooked! I started to frequent spaces where Hip Hop was. The benefit of growing up in Mitchell’s plain (an apartheid Group Areas Act scheme) was that Hip Hop was everywhere”. He then became a member of the Universal Zulu Nation and started with break dancing not knowing that he’d return to it later in his life being a student of Capoeira. Capoeira is the mother of break dancing.

Over the years Nama Xam has been producing and performing with many artists such as Jean Pierre (!Khu-aob), Streetmatterphysics (School Of Thought), Blaq Pearl, Brandon Florus (Flo4Soul), Ej Von Lyrik (Godessa), Dj Azhul (BVK), Brendan Adams ( Adam Speaks), Linkris, SiepSokkie, Chase Lutron and Perspektif and many more. Also doing community edutaiment drives through park jams on the Cape Flats such as Mitchells Plain, Kuilsriver, Belhar, Lavender hill and Eerste River. Nama Xam is the founding member of the group Jy!7 (pronounced – Jey sev-uhn) and along with partner Flo4Soul bring “soulfully social” music to the people. As a poet Nama Xam has been a regular at the Verses poetry session and the group jy!7.ven has featured as well.
Through record company African Dope records he was given the chance to remix a track of Cape Town based group Moodphase 5. The track is called Violation. It featured on the 2005 release called African Dope which won a SAMA (South African Music Award) for that year.

Performances that Nama Xam has been involved in:

2004:

National Arts and Culture Awards, UWC Poetry Festival

2005:
Red Cross Society annual Christmas outreach show
Live performances for Gam Sushi @ Obs Café

2007:
The Wonders of Being Out There (WoBoT) @ Zula Soundbar
Halman Walk Youth Development annual Christmas outreach in Hanover Park
Neutral Ground @ Katalist
CVET gig @ Athlone technical college
Friends of Cuba fundraiser @ Salt River community centre
Verses @ Zula Soundbar
Youth day Gig @ Alliance Frances

2008:
Launch of the Western Cape Music Association’s Benevolent fund
All Elements Hip Hop gig @ North Pine Community Hall

2010:
Nekkies Hip Hop Festival

2011:
Infecting the City festival
Verses

2012: 

Best of Ekapa Hip Hop underground

At present Nama Xam is busy with recording his solo album titled – The Chastising of Xam.

Naima Mclean

Naima is an enormously talented writer, poet and vocalist born in New York City and raised in numerous cities across South Africa.

She has earned a degree in theatre and performing arts from the University of Capetown, performed, acted and sang in South Africa and Europe.

Naima performs as a poet in her personal capacity as well as with the collective Rite 2 Speak, a group of young South African theatre practitioners, who felt that the voices of their generation were not represented in theatre. The collective fuses the performance of poetry, music and theatrical aspects as a vehicle to encourage physical engagement with the audience.

Naima’s current TV roles include cameo features on one of South Africa’s most watched TV dramas Generations, presenting for South African Coca Cola game shows as well as a feature character in the internationally renowned UK TV series Wild AT Heart.

Kyle Louw

Kyle’s poetry is by no means conventional; it does not follow grammar rules or structure. It definitely won’t go down in history as some of the best-written work. Kyle does not care about that! He cares about changing people’s perspective on topics of the mind and spirit, topics like society norms, love, and social media. He cares about sharing that feeling you get when you hear something that resonates with you, when the goosebumps shoot up your arms and that inspirational shiver slides down your spine. He wants people to be able to relate on a human level and say, “I understand where he is coming from because I feel the same emotions he does on a daily basis.”

Kolade Arogundade

Kolade Arogundade is a land economist, poet, world music aficionado, writer, political animal and football fiend. Recently he has started an initiative called Giants in the Land which has so far published two books of poetry. He is currently working on his first novel.

Kobus Moolman

Kobus Moolman was born in 1964 in Pietermaritzburg. He is a senior lecturer in creative writing in the Department of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He holds a PhD in English Studies from UKZN.
In 2013 he received the 2013 Sol Plaatje European Union poetry award. In the same year, he was the Mellon Writer in Residence at Rhodes University for three months, and he also published his most recent poetry anthology, Left Over (Dye Hard Press). The collection has been widely acknowledged as his strongest to date.

In 2012 he was commissioned by the Performing Arts Centre of the Free State to adapt  Zakes Mda’s the novel, The Madonna of Excelsior, for the stage. The production has travelled to several theatres in the country, including the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and the State Theatre in Pretoria.

In 2010 he published Light and After (Deep South Press). The collection was launched at the 14th Poetry Africa festival in Durban. In the same year he received the South African Literary Award for Poetry for his collection, Separating the Seas. Founded by the national Ministry of Arts & Culture, the South African Literary Awards honour South African literary practitioners, while encouraging the advancement of literary heritage and practice.

In 2010 he was a special guest, for two months, of the Creative Writing Research Group of the University of Calgary in Canada. During this period he gave readings of his work and lectured, including at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He was also an invited guest at the 2010 Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, during which time he performed at the Banff Centre for the Arts and in Canmore. In the same year he edited and published, Tilling the Hard Soil: poetry, prose and art by   South African Writers with Disabilities (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press). He was also the invited dramaturge on a two-week residency for South African and Dutch scriptwriters organized by the Twist Theatre Development Project during the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. He was invited back as dramaturge in 2011 and 2013.

In 2009 one of poems was nominated for a US Pushcart Prize. At the beginning of 2008, he participated in a three-week collaborative residency at the Caversham Centre for Writers and Artists in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. During this residency he produced a limited edition, hand-bound collection of poems entitled Anatomy. This cycle of poems was later published in the Journal of Disability Studies (OhioStateUniversity). It also won the Dramatic and Literary Rights (DALRO) Prize for the best poem to appear in New Coin magazine in 2008.

A collection of his radio plays, Blind Voices, was published by Botsotso Publishers in 2007. The collection is sponsored by the British Council and features a CD of the BBC production of his earlier award-winning play, Soldier Boy.

In 2008,  he was on the panel of adjudicators for the Ingrid Jonker award, and in 2009 he was a judge for the Thomas Pringle Award for Poetry.He was the founding editor of the annual KwaZulu-Natal poetry journal, Fidelities, which ran from 1995 until 2007.  As co-ordinator of the Fidelities Poetry Project he conducted creative writing workshops and readings for a variety of interest groups, from offenders in prison to high school youth.  From 2000 to 2009 he edited the poetry titles for the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, working on collections by Karen Press, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Kelwyn Sole and Makhosazana Xaba, amongst others.

In 2007 he was also named joint winner of the 2007 NLDTF/PANSA Festival of Contemporary Theatre Readings of New Writing for his new play, Stone Angel. This is the second time he has won this major South African award for theatre writing. In the same year he was the chairperson of the selection committee for the Olive Schreiner Poetry Prize sponsored by the English Academy of Southern Africa.

In 2004 his play, Full Circle, was awarded the Jury Prize for Best Script in the Performing Arts Network of South Africa (PANSA) Festival of Reading of New Writing. The play premiered at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2005, directed by Charmaine Weir-Smith, and was critically acclaimed. It was subsequently produced at the Hilton College Theatre in Pietermaritzburg and at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. The play was also produced as part of the Southern African theatre season at the Oval House Theatre in London in 2006. The script was published in 2007 by Dye Hard Press.  And in 2008 it was produced by the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

In 2004 he was commissioned by Bush Radio (Cape Town) to adapt Gomolemo Mokae’s short story, Milk and Honey Galore, for the radio.

In 2003 he was a runner-up in the BBC African Performance radio drama competition. His winning play was produced for the BBC World Service. In the same year it was also read at the Moscow Theatre Festival of New Writing. His collection, Feet of the Sky was published by Brevitas Press.
In 2001 he was one of five South African poets featured in a collection by Botsotso Publishers, entitled simply, 5 Poetry.

In 1998 he was awarded the Helen Martins Fellowship which enabled him to spend a month in the Karoo village of Nieu Bethesda working on an anthology of poetry.  This collection, entitled, Time like Stone was published by UKZN Press in 2000. The collection was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize for 2001, the premier South African award for a debut anthology.

In 1992 he was a finalist in the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award. He is the recipient of the BBC African Radio Theatre Award (1987), the Macmillan Southern African Playwriting Award (1991) and in 2000 he won a merit award in the Noupoort Reward for Playwriting.

Khadijah Ibrahim

Khadijah Ibrahiim is of Jamaican parentage, born in the city of Leeds, England. Educated at the University of Leeds; she has a MA in Theatre Studies. She is the Artistic Director of Leeds Young Authors and the Producer of Leeds Youth poetry Slam festival. Peepal Tree press published her poetry collection Rootz Runnin in 2008 that same year she toured the USA with the Fwords Creative Freedom writers. As a delegate for the Art Council England (Yorkshire) she attended Calabash International Literature Festival in Jamaica. She became one of the first international writers to attend the El Gouna Writers Residency in Egypt, 2010.

She was a member the advisory group that organized some of the events, which marked the visit of Dr Nelson Mandela to the City of Leeds. Hailed as one of Yorkshire’s ‘most prolific’ poets by BBC Radio, she continues to make various stage appearances across Britain, the USA, the Caribbean and Africa. Peepal Tree Press will publish her latest collection of poems later this year

Kgoshii Tshwarelo Mogakane

Inspirational speaker Kgoshii Tshwarelo Mogakane is an Author, Speaker and Hip Hop/Poetry Writer/Vocalist who lives and works in Mpumalanga’s capital city, Mbombela in South Africa.

Kgoshii is a leader in his own right and uses his ability to speak as a transformation tool for audiences around his home province of Mpumalanga and beyond.
Kgoshii Mogakane believes that self-transformation is the most powerful path to real economic empowerment.

Furthermore Kgoshii, is a professional managing sub editor working with Southern Africa’s leading news agency, African Eye News Service (AENS). He is responsible for quality control on all newswire content published by AENS through their myriad of mainstream and community newspaper clients.

His writings have been widely published in national newspapers such as City Press, The Star, Mail & Guardian, Sunday Independent, Sunday Sun, Sowetan Sunday World and Daily Sun among others. He has also written for magazines such as Bona, News Weekly, Enterprise, Sunrise, Lowveld Living and Capital Magazine. His other writings have been widely published on international news website, news24.com and the South African government’s SA News site.

Kenneth Ibegwam

Kenneth Ibegwam was born in Owerri, Nigeria, and grew up in Lagos Nigeria. A graduate of Imo State University, he generally considers himself a “reader of books” still trying to understand the rudiments of graduate school. He lives in Maryland.

Keneilwe Idle Mohutsiwa

Keneilwe is a web and mobile application developer, poet and rapper from the town of Kanye in Southern Botswana. He’s one of Botswana’s sprouting talents. This twenty four year old has performed at various open-mics and school talent shows in Gaborone and Kanye.

In November 2010, Keneliwe performed in a poetry event dubbed Unfolding the Scrolls: Chronicles of the Poets – Part 1 organized and hosted by Poetavango Spoken Word Poetry in Maun, Botswana.

Kelwyn Sole

Kelwyn Sole grew up in Johannesburg and has degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London. He has published widely in local and international books and journals, mainly on issues pertaining to South African and postcolonial literature and culture, as well as being involved in published debates and polemics. He has also published six individual collections of poetry. He has won the Olive Schreiner Prize, the Sydney Clouts Prize and the Thomas Pringle Award for poetry, and was a runner-up for the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. He has won the AA Mutual Life/Vita Award and the Thomas Pringle Award for his critical work.

Books:

The Blood of Our Silence (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1988)
Projections in the Past Tense (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1992)
Love That is Night  (Durban, Gecko Books, 1998)
Mirror and Water Gazing  (Pietermaritzburg, Gecko/University of Natal Press, 2001)
Land dreaming: prose poems (Pietermaritzburg, University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2006
Absent Tongues (Cape Town, Hands-On Books, 2012)

Kayo Chingonyi

Kayo Chingonyi has performed his poetry in countless live venues across the UK. His work has been broadcast on Radio Five Live and Sheffield Live and is anthologized in The Shuffle Anthology 2009 and City Lighthouse (tall-lighthouse, 2009) as well as appearing in print and online magazines including Pomegranate, Tate Etc and Wasafiri.

He has completed commissions for organisations such as Louis Vuitton and The Poetry Society and was a contributor to Asking a Shadow to Dance a DVD anthology, produced by Oxfam, launched in December 2009.

Karyl Huggees

good little children are seen and not heard; so HUGGEES spent early performing years more focused on looking pretty and less on speaking up. with a background in folk dance and steelpan, there were many opportunities to glitter across various stages in north america. HUGGEES left a chorus of primary schoolmates in trinidad and tobago to perform with a family band throughout canada and then later spent a year with a touring performing arts company based in seattle. during that transient time HUGGEES soon looked to thoughts for companionship. after winning a few speech art competitions, a personal relationship with poetry began; organizing spoken word events and performing spoken word quickly followed. HUGGEES now cohosts on community radio in both spoken word and caribbean music programming.
this for HUGGEES is the return from a much needed break from the spotlight. while working with under-served families, HUGGEES uses art as a therapeutic recreation tool. the motivation to engage audiences once more, stems from the continual exposure to communal secrets and the commitment to be more open in order to continue needed conversations around healing. there is power in performance.
HUGGEES is determined to be a carton voice, playwright, dohl player and other artistic ventures as breath allows.

Kaie Kellough

Kaie Kellough is a Montréal writer, performer, and general word-sound systemizer. He is the author of Lettricity (Cumulus Press 2004), and Maple Leaf Rag (Arbeiter Ring Publishing 2010), which was nominated for the Manuela Dias award for book design. Kaie is the voice of one sound recording, Vox:Versus, a suite of conversations between voice and instrument.

Kaie’s print and sound work are underwritten by rhythm and by a desire to dis-and re-assemble language and meaning. Kaie’s work emerges where voice, language, music, and text intersect. He blends word-games with sound poetry, dub, and jazzoetry. He has performed and published internationally, and has led sound poetry workshops at the Banff Center for the Arts. Kaie is presently working on short fiction and on poems that say goodbye.

Kwame Dawes

Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet, Kwame Dawes is the award-winning author of sixteen books of poetry (most recently, Wheels, 2011) and numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska.   Kwame Dawes also teaches in the Pacific MFA Writing program.

Kokumo Noxid

Jamaica is without doubt the foremost nation in the world for reggae! However the cultural, political and social climate tends to shape the musical offerings of this glorious nation.

Kokumo is a citizen and artisan from Jamaica whose debut album Writing’s On The Wall may well be the finest recording in the dub poetry vain for many a decade. Kokumo’s delivery will obviously draw comparisons to Mutabaruka but there is an originality of style that will appeal to audiences worldwide.

Described as not just an artist but also a cultural anthropologist and dub-griot, Kokumo uses his skills as a singer/songwriter and a dub-poet to capture his audience, whilst taking them on a cultural, spiritual and political journey.

Hailed from the parish better known as the cockpit country in rural Jamaica, seems to have contributed to the powerful voice that allows his words to take flight.

With a name meaning, “this one will not die” in Yoruba, is synonymous with the notion that his work will be around forever.

His work is rooted in the consciousness of Rasta and the cultural experiences of black people worldwide. This consciousness was triggered from an early age which he credited to being around his Rastafarian cousins but didn’t manifest until a later stage in life when he began to write songs and poetry.

Kokumo’s multidisciplinary skills as a performer have landed him roles in plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company and his own sold out production, GENESIS 9:25 @ The Birmingham Rep. Theatre, 2010. He also appeared at The Tate Britain, The Poetry Café London, BBC Radio 4, B-Spoken Word, BBC WM, Robert Beckford Show and the colourful face introducing Benjamin Zephaniah at Griotology held at The Drum, for his T.V. documentary, This OBE Is Not For Me.

Kokumo has being commissioned to write and perform for organizations such as Oxfam International Birmingham, Arts Council England, West Midlands and BBC WM to mark the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade in The British Parliament. Other highlights include his appearance at Calabash Festival, Glastonbury Festival and being included in the “RED” anthology published by Peepal Tree Press 2010.

His written works has also being published in numerous magazines and online journals, most recent appeared in dialogue – a magazine for cultural literacy, No. 2/Vol. 3, (http://www.lulu.com/roikwabena), edited by the late Dr. Roi Kwabena.

Kneo Mokgopa

Kneo was born and raised in Johannesburg, with a mother who built a home for him and his siblings out of nothing. His mother raised him with considerable effort and some comfort but he had to find his own feet, and as such he is studying law at the University of Cape Town. His poetry emerged from his love of love, philosophy and history, as well as his experience of being a part of the liminal class of the ‘born frees’.

Khadija Heeger

Khadija Tracey Carmelita Heeger was born Cape Town. She was raised on the Cape Flats in the township of Hanover Park. She started performing when she was nine years old, her dream was to be an actress, but at 15, she started writing seriously and this is how she expresses herself now. She is a well-known and popular performance poet.

In 2007 she was commissioned to write a multidisciplinary theatrical poetry piece in collaboration with indigenous soundscape artists, Khoikonnexion, for the Spier Poetry Festival in 2008. These performances were greeted with standing ovations. This piece was later taken to Grahamstown Festival in 2009 (funded by the National Arts Council of South Africa).

Beyond the Delivery Room is her first collection of poems. Beyond the Delivery Room is the first part in a trilogy called Separation Anxiety. She is currently writing the second, Blood Words, following the crooked lines of DNA. She has also performed in Amherst in the USA, as part of an artist’s exchange programme.

Kerry Hammerton

Kerry Hammerton has published poetry in various South African and UK literary journals. Some of her poems were included in the anthology Difficult to Explain (Finuala Dowling ed.) and Africa, My Africa (Patricia Schonstein ed.). These are the lies I told you, her debut poetry collection, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010.

Kennet B

Odongo Kennedy Leakey, known in the entertainment industry as Kennet B, started writing spoken word poetry 14 years ago. He began performing actively in early 2009 after winning the Slam Africa Poetry Championship founded by Imani Womera of Imani Inc. Prior to this, he had recorded his first spoken word poetry single Reality Absurdity, the video for which is forthcoming. Driven by the global concern about HIV and AIDS, his lyrics are majorly pegged on the social issues that are responsible for the spread of the virus.

He has four albums on the table; Coming of Age, a seven track pure spoken word poetry album , Success a 15 track musical-poetry album, Cheka na Kennet, and Refugee.

Currently Kennet is working on a short stories compilation The Sheng Anthology vol 1. This is a collection of conflict-laden social narratives aimed at impacting the repeated emphatic distress felt when a favorite character is seen in imminent danger. This often enhances the enjoyment of the stories and one sees the resolution of the threat (HIV&AIDS) as the narratives unfold.

Kemba King

kemba king is an artist. healer. storyteller.

she has been writing and sharing her art for over 10 years. in 2009 and 2010 she was a part of the anitafrika dub theatre playwrights-in-residence program where she wrote and co-produced the biomyth monodrama where the stories are told. during the same year, she participated and culminated from the sacred leaders mentorship program from sacred women centres international. she hosted and co-produced a radio show entitled womyn’s words for over 10 years. she also co-directed and co-facilitated the medina collective – an organisation committed to informing and engaging young women of colour in media literacy primarily via hip hop.

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk published his collection of prison & other protest poems, Emergency Poems, in 1992. He served on the executive of the Congress of South Africa Writers, COSAW, in the 1980s, and today hosts the Lansdowne Local Writers’ Group. He has performed and published over 160 poems, the latter in many magazines.

A Fulbright scholar, Keith lectures in Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape.

Kate Ellis-Cole

Kate Ellis-Cole is an enigma. Always perfectly styled, she carries herself with a secret confidence that’s almost regal. Grace and eloquence spill from her lips in conversation and it’s difficult not to form certain preconceived expectations when this soft-spoken lady steps on stage: she’s white, she’s a woman and she clearly sounds privileged. And then she opens her mouth. Kate’s poetry and subject matter is far from what the initial impression would lead one to expect. From political satire to the strong cross-cultural ties she experiences with land and country, her poetry reflects magnitudes of conscientious and sensitive living and there’s something about her and the unapologetic sincerity with which she speaks and performs that’s endearing and mesmerising.

Karin Schimke

Karin Schimke is a widely published journalist and columnist, and the Cape Times books editor. She also works as a writing tutor and mentor, an author of non-fiction – including the best-selling Fabulously Forty and Beyond, co-written with Margie Orford – of children’s books and of short stories. She edited Open, an anthology of erotic short stories written by some of South Africa’s best known women writers. Her poetry has appeared in South Africa Writing, New Contrast, New Coin and Carapace magazines. Bare & Breaking her first collection of poems won the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 2014.

Kai Lossgott

German-born, Kai Lossgott lives and works in Cape Town. In search of poetry, he travelled from paper to canvas, from theatre to film, and into digital media. In his performances, poems, experimental films and plant leaf engravings, he investigates biophysical language patterns and the vulnerable instincts which drive them sensitivity, silence, and acts of sensing. In a human-centred world, his aim is most often to work from a life-centred perspective.

Lwanda

 

Lwanda Sindaphi is an actor, playwright, theatre director and Xhosa poet. He is a graduate of New Africa Theatre Academy and Magnet Theatre. In 2011, he won the Cape Town Drama for Life Lover + Another Poetry Slam and competed in the national finals in Johannesburg. In 2013, he won the most promising director award at the Zabalazaa Theatre Festival at the Baxter Theatre Centre and is a co-founder of Lingua Franca Spoken Word Movement.