No Free Sleeping

Donald Parenzee is an architect and a poet who was active for many years in cultural initiatives opposed to apartheid. He lives in Cape Town, where he has practised and taught architecture, worked as an exhibitions curator at the District Six Museum, and collaborated on creative interventions in the city. He has run many creative workshops, some of which explore ways of integrating literature and visual art. Donald hosted talks explores the role that the poet can play in the daily existence of his/her community during his stay in Grahamstown as Mellon Writer in Residence, working with the Rhodes MA programme in Creative Writing. 

Since the early 1990s Alan Finlay's poems have been published in journals and anthologies in South Africa and abroad. He founded and edited two important literary magazines, Bleksem and donga (co-edited with Paul Wessels), and has been an editor of the poetry journal New Coin. He lives between Johannesburg and Pergamino, Argentina and works as a writer, researcher, editor and university teacher in the field of communications freedoms and rights. That Kind of Door is his fifth collection of poems.

VONANI BILA was born in 1972 in Shirley village, Limpopo, where he still lives. He is the author of five books of poems in English and eight story-books for newly literate adult readers in Sepedi, Xitsonga and English. Bila is a driving force in South African poetry - founding editor of the Timbila poetry journal, publisher of Timbila books and founder of Timbila Writers' Village, a rural retreat centre for writers.