Kristina Masuwa-Morgan (born 28 February 1963) [1] is a Zimbabwean poet and short story writer, better known as Kristina Rungano. [2] She was the first published Zimbabwean woman poet. [3]
Rungano was born in 1963 in Harare, Zimbabwe. [4] Her father, who was Roman Catholic, ran a business in Zvimba District. [5] She was educated at Catholic boarding schools near her hometown, before moving to the United Kingdom to study management and computer science. [4] In 1979, having gained a diploma in computer science, she returned to Zimbabwe and worked at the Harare Scientific Computing Centre. [5]
Her first poetry collection, A Storm is Brewing, was published by Zimbabwe Publishing House in 1984; this made her the first female Zimbabwean poet to have her work published. [4] Her poetry particularly covers themes relating to the experiences of women and war. [4] [6] Some of her poetry has subsequently been included in anthologies such as Daughters of Africa (1992), [7] The Heinemann Book of African Women's Poetry (1995), The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry (1999) and Step into a World: A Global Anthology of New Black Literature (2000). [2] [4] Rungano's second collection, To Seek a Reprieve and Other Poems, was published in 2004. [2]
Rungano currently lives in England, [4] where she is the Director of Learning and Teaching at the University of Greenwich. [6]
Chenjerai Hove, was a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both English and Shona. "Modernist in their formal construction, but making extensive use of oral conventions, Hove's novels offer an intense examination of the psychic and social costs - to the rural population, especially, of the war of liberation in Zimbabwe." He died on 12 July 2015 while living in exile in Norway, with his death attributed to liver failure.
Yvonne Vera was an author from Zimbabwe. Her first published book was a collection of short stories, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals (1992), which was followed by five novels: Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994), Under the Tongue (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998), and The Stone Virgins (2002). Her novels are known for their poetic prose, difficult subject-matter, and their strong women characters, and are firmly rooted in Zimbabwe's difficult past. For these reasons, she has been widely studied and appreciated by those studying postcolonial African literature.
Mary Dorcey is an Irish poet, novelist, short story writer, feminist and LGBT activist. She was a former writer in residence at Trinity College Dublin and the Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre of University College Dublin. She has been described as a lyric poet who celebrates the life of the emotions and senses. She speaks of her fiction work as exploring the intimate space between social structures and individual imagination. Clodagh Corcoran in The Irish Times described her novel Biography of Desire as "arguably the first truly erotic Irish novel."
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
Frank Mkalawile Chipasula is a Malawian writer, editor and university professor, "easily one of the best of the known writers in the discourse of Malawian letters".
Valerie Martínez is an American poet, educator, arts administrator, consultant, and collaborative artist. She served as the poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico from 2008 to 2010.
Osborne Henry Kwesi Brew was a Ghanaian poet and diplomat.
Steve Bernard Miles Chimombo was a Malawian writer, poet, editor and teacher. He was born in Zomba.
African poetry encompasses the wide variety of traditions arising from Africa's 55 countries and from evolving trends within different literary genres. It is a large and complex subject, partly because of Africa's original linguistic diversity but primarily because of the devastating effect of slavery and colonization, which resulted in English, Portuguese and French, as well as Creole or pidgin versions of these European languages, being spoken and written by Africans across the continent.
Gladys May Casely-HayfordaliasAquah Laluah was a Gold Coast-born Sierra Leonean writer. She is credited as the first author to write in the Krio language.
Jeni Couzyn is a feminist poet and anthologist of South African extraction who lives and works in Canada and the United Kingdom. Her best known collection is titled Life by Drowning: Selected Poems (1985), which includes an earlier sequence A Time to Be Born (1981) that chronicles her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter.
Lindiwe Mabuza was a South African politician, diplomat, poet, academic, journalist, and cultural activist. She was an anti-apartheid activist who went on to serve her country as a member of the first democratically elected parliament of South Africa. She then proceeded to a career as a distinguished diplomat. She served on the Advisory Board of Elders of the Ifa Lethu Foundation, which repatriates South African artworks. She was a patron of Dramatic Need, a United Kingdom–based charity that promotes creative arts for children, and was an advisory Council Member of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation. She served as the chairperson of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund UK.
Rashidah Ismaili, also known as Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr, is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and playwright who was born in Cotonou, Benin, West Africa, and in the 1950s migrated to the US, where she still lives in Harlem, New York City. She was part of the Black Arts Movement in New York in the 1960s. She is also an arts and culture critic and taught literature by French- and English-speaking African writers in higher education institutes for more than 30 years.
Barbara Makhalisa, also known by her married name as Barbara Nkala, is a teacher, Zimbabwean writer, Ndebele translator, novelist, editor and publisher, one of the earliest female writers published in Zimbabwe. She is the author of several books written in Ndebele, as well as in English, of which some have been used as school textbooks. Barbara is married to Shadreck Nkala. They have three adult children and six grandchildren.
Irene Staunton is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, researcher and writer, who has worked in literature and the arts since the 1970s, both in the UK and Zimbabwe. She is co-founder and publisher of Weaver Press in Harare, having previously co-founded Baobab Books. Staunton is the editor of several notable anthologies covering oral history, short stories, and poetry, including Mothers of the Revolution: War Experiences of Thirty Zimbabwean Women (1990), Children in our Midst: Voices of Farmworker's Children (2000), Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe (2003), Women Writing Zimbabwe (2008), Writing Free (2011), and Writing Mystery & Mayhem (2015).
Irène Assiba d'Almeida is a Beninese poet, translator and literary scholar. She is Professor of Francophone Studies and French at the University of Arizona.
Assumpta Oturu is a Ugandan-American journalist and poet. She hosts a weekly radio programme, 'Spotlight Africa', on the Los Angeles-based radio station KPFK. She has published poetry as Assumpta Acam-Oturu.
Melanie Silgardo is an Indian poet and editor of Goan origin who currently lives in London.
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