Gary Cummiskey (born 1963) is a South African poet and publisher.
Cummiskey was born in England and moved to South Africa in 1969 with his family for a few years and he returned in 1983 as an adult. [1] He is the founder and editor of Dye Hard Press, which, since 1994, has published writers such as Khulile Nxumalo, Gail Dendy, Arja Salafranca, Alan Finlay, Philip Zhuwao, Roy Blumenthal, Gus Ferguson, Kobus Moolman, Pravasan Pillay, Graeme Feltham and Allan Kolski Horwitz. He edited Green Dragon literary journal from 2002 to 2009. [2] [3]
Cummiskey is co-editor with Eva Kowalska of Who was Sinclair Beiles? published by Dye Hard Press in 2009. [4] A revised and expanded edition was published in 2014. Also in 2009, Cummiskey compiled Beauty Came Grovelling Forward, a selection of South African poetry and prose published online at www.bigbridge.org.
He was a participant in the 2008 Poetry Africa International Festival held in Durban, South Africa.
Through Dye Hard Press, Cummiskey published an anthology of South African short fiction, The Edge of Things, selected by Arja Salafranca, in 2011.
Cummiskey's work has been translated into Arabic, French, Bangla and Greek. Three of his poems have inspired short films.
He published a book of short fiction, Off-ramp, in 2013. The collection was shortlisted for the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award 2014.
From 2014 to 2016 he was editor of the South African poetry journal New Coin, which is published by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa, at Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
Lionel Abrahams was a South African novelist, poet, editor, critic, essayist and publisher. He was born in Johannesburg, where he lived his entire life. He was born with cerebral palsy and had to use a wheelchair until 11 years of age.
Mhlophe, known as Gcina Mhlophe, is a South African storyteller, writer, playwright, and actress. In 2016, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women. She tells her stories in four of South Africa's languages: English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa, and also helps to motivate children to read.
Anne Kellas is an Australian poet, reviewer and editor, who was born in South Africa and emigrated to Australia in 1986.
Keorapetse William Kgositsile, also known by his pen name Bra Willie, was a South African Tswana poet, journalist and political activist. An influential member of the African National Congress in the 1960s and 1970s, he was inaugurated as South Africa's National Poet Laureate in 2006. Kgositsile lived in exile in the United States from 1962 until 1975, the peak of his literary career. He made an extensive study of African-American literature and culture, becoming particularly interested in jazz. During the 1970s he was a central figure among African-American poets, encouraging interest in Africa as well as the practice of poetry as a performance art; he was well known for his readings in New York City jazz clubs. Kgositsile was one of the first to bridge the gap between African poetry and African-American poetry in the United States.
Sinclair Beiles was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature. He won the 1969 Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry for his collection, Ashes of Experience.
Donato Francisco Mattera, better known as Don Mattera, was a South African poet and author.
Hugh "Gus" Ferguson was a South African poet, small publisher, cartoonist, and pharmacist.
Arja Salafranca is a South African writer and poet. She has had fiction, poetry and essays published in a number of journals and anthologies.
Poetry Africa is an international poetry festival held annually in Durban, South Africa.
Johann de Lange is an Afrikaans poet, short story writer and critic.
Modjaji Books is a South African small-scale independent publisher. Started in 2007 by Colleen Higgs, it is an independent press that publishes the writings of Southern African women. Many Modjaji titles have gone on to be nominated for and to win prestigious literary awards both in South Africa and internationally.
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a South African writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally. She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the biracial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa. She has written: "I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side. After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification." She has also said: "Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up." As Tishani Doshi observes in the New Indian Express: "Much of her work is concerned with race, sexuality, class and gender within the South African context."
Imraan Coovadia is a South African novelist, essayist, and academic. He is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Cape Town. He has taught 19th-Century Studies and Creative Writing at a number of US universities. His debut novel, The Wedding, published simultaneously in the US and SA in 2001, has been translated into Hebrew and Italian.
Kelwyn Sole is a South African poet and academic.
Nick Mulgrew is a South African-British novelist, poet, and editor. In addition to his writing, he is the founder and director of the poetry press uHlanga.
Sally-Ann Murray is an author from South Africa.
Phillip Zhuwao was a Zimbabwean poet.