Katleho Kano Shoro is a performance poet, writer, social science graduate (MA) and steadfast enthusiast of Africa-centred literary initiatives.

This Johannesburg-born poet has been writing and performing poetry since the mid-2000s. She has taken to infusing her poetic proclivities within her scholarly pursuits: namely, through her Honours dissertation which explored contemporary performance poetry in South Africa (2010), and as the co-editor of The Spoken Word Project: Stories Travelling Through Africa – a publication edited together with Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Christopher Ouma and anchored within a Goethe Institute project. While she has participated in African literary initiatives in various ways, her work with the African Arts Institute (AFAI) and Langaa RPCIG is worth mentioning. As a former project manager at AFAI, she coordinated African literary discussions in Cape Town and hosted African writers as part of the Franschhoek Literary Festival. Katleho’s work with the Cameroon-based research and publishing initiative, Langaa RPCIG, has included coordinating and facilitating literature workshops in Cape Town and Cameroon.

Katleho has performed her poetry in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Grahamstown and Swaziland in spaces such as Yfm, Verses and HOLAAfrica events. Between 2008 and 2009, she was a finalist and core poet in Poetry Delight Cape Town and Poetry Delight Johannesburg, respectively. Through the collective, she also produced Poetry Delight Grahamstown: Chemistry of the Arts – a theatrical poetry production which formed part of the National Arts Festival Fringe programme (2009). Katleho was a featured poet in Nike’s CAPE/BURG (IAM1) Project in 2009 where she wrote and recorded the poem, “Remember Me”, for the project and CAPE/BURG (IAM1) book.

Her poem, Sesotho saka will not be written italics, was recently published in the journal, Killens Review of Arts and Letters (2015). She is currently editing her first collection of poetry, Serurubele Poetries.