Books & Spoken Word
Voices of Africa
Afrika Eye, in collaboration with Boat Poets and Raise The Bar Spoken Word, present an evening of music and spoken word artists, who will be responding to the theme Voices Of Africa.
Headliners include: Zena Edwards, Bristol-based poet, Tjawangwa Dema (pictured), and Saili Katebe.
Zena Edwards is a London-based performance poet, writer and musician. Her vibrant poetry is inspired by her experiences of travel, particularly through Africa, as well as traditional African music and song. She often accompanies her work with mbira, kalimba and marimba (thumb pianos). Zena has performed at WOMAD, The London Jazz Festival, Poetry International at the Royal Festival Hall, The URB Hip Hop Festival (Helsinki), Glastonbury as well as many others.
Tjawangwa Dema is a poet, educator and arts administrator. Her collection The Careless Seamstress (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry. Her chapbook Mandible (Slapering Hol Press, 2014) was selected for the African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets series. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and has given readings and taught workshops in over twenty countries. She was 2012 Fall Resident at the University of Iowa and a 2016 Writer in Residence at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. She has recorded a multi-lingual audio anthology featuring 12 leading Batswana poets and coordinated the recording of over twenty poets for the pan African poetry archive Badilisha. Her poems have been re-worked by bands into lyrics, used for theatre and dance collaborations, recorded as videos and dropped from a helicopter over London as well as translated into languages including Spanish, Chinese, German and Swedish. In 2019 she gave the Ohio University African Studies spring lecture and co-produced the Africa Writes – Bristol festival.
Saili Katebe is a Wiltshire based writer, workshop facilitator and performance poet. Usually writing under the pen name “The Blissful Nomad” he is a keen explorer of the possibilities that language and arts have to offer. In love with rhythm and rhyme he uses the page and the stage to share his exploration of the lived experience through language and story. Throughout Afrika Eye Saili will be a Boat Poet in residence on board the SS Great Britain.
Photo credit: Petra Rolinec
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