Tjawangwa Dema

Tjawangwa Dema is a writer, perhaps even a poet-scholar. If pushed, she would say that she is particularly interested in intertextuality and intersections – in the hopes that this will allow her to continue to practice holding more than one thought at once as well as the room to think about anything and everything, carefully. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize, TJ is alumna of the HarperCollins Author Academy, an honorary fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and sits on multiple poetry festival/institute boards. An Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol she co-produces the Africa Writes – Bristol festival and is a 2021 Grinnell Fellow. Tjawangwa’s chapbook, an/other pastoral, exploring ethnicity and the environment is forthcoming from No Bindings in 2022.

Selected publications

The Careless Seamstress (University of Nebraska Press, 2019)

“How to Read a Poetry Class: Teaching Poetry in the 21^st Century.” Inspire: Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing, edited by Emma Brankin, Francis Gilbert and Carinya Sharples (London: CLCL – Goldsmiths University, 2020), pp. 94 – 106.

You can find out more about her work here.