African Studies Global Forum: Black Feminist Poetry

Please join African Studies Global Forum this Friday, August 27th at 9 AM EST / 3 PM SAST for a poetry reading and discussion on Black Feminist Poetry by the South African writers, Makhosazana Xaba, Ronelda Kamfer and Gabeba Baderoon, who will talk about their work and the award-winning collection, Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018. Please contact Johey Verfaille at juv12@psu.edu for Zoom registration information.

Makhosazana Xaba is an award-winning anthologist and short story writer. She has published three collections of poetry, these hands (2005 and 2017), Tongues of their Mothers (2008) and The Alkalinity of Bottled Water (2019). Forthcoming in 2021 is The Art of Waiting for Tales: Found Poetry from Grace, the novel. Her most recent edited anthology, Our Word, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000 – 2015 (2019), was hailed as “an instant classic” and was joint winner of the 2021 Humanities and Social Sciences Award in the Non-Fiction Edited Volume category.

Ronelda Sonnet Kamfer was born in Cape Town. She spent a portion of her childhood on a farm in Grabouw, where her grandparents were farmworkers. She moved to the Cape Flats with her family and regards this dual reality as the source of her poetic voice. Her debut poetry collection, Noudat Slapende Honde (2008), won the Eugène Marais Prize. Her second book, Grond/Santekraam, won the Absa Kanna Award in (2012). She has been a writer in residence in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and in La Rochelle, France. Her third collection, Hammie, was published in 2016 and fourth in Chinatown (2019). Her work has been translated into Dutch by Alfred Schaffer, Nu de Slapende Honde (2009), Santenkraam (2012), Mammie (2017) and Chinatown (2021) by Podium Uitgeverij Amsterdam, Italian, Terra/E tutto il resto (2018) by Raffaelli Editore and French (2021), Caracters Editore in Paris. She completed her MA degree at Rhodes University in 2018. Chinatown her fourth poetry collection was published in 2019 by Kwela publishers. Her debut novel, Kompoun will be published 2021 by Kwela publishers. She is currently working on a fifth poetry collection and a collection of short stories.

Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collections, The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy, and the monograph Regarding Muslims: from Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Baderoon serves on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund, which has published over 60 collections by African poets since 2012. She has co-edited three journal special issues, most recently on “African Feminisms: Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century” with Alicia Decker in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Baderoon is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, where she co-directs the African Feminist Initiative.