Keorapetse Kgositsile

South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile attended Madibane High School in Johannesburg and wrote for the subsequently banned political weekly New Age. He began a self-imposed exile in 1961 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, writing for Spearhead magazine. From 1962 to 1975 he lived in the United States, first as a graduate student and then as a teacher or poet-in-residence at various universities before moving to Tanzania to lecture in English at the University of Dar es Salaam. After the end of apartheid, Kgositsile returned to South Africa, and in 2001 he settled in Johannesburg, where he was named poet laureate in 2006, and died in 2018 after a short illness.

Kgositsile’s poetry includes Spirits Unchained (1969), For Melba (1970), My Name Is Afrika (1971), The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live (1974), Places and Bloodstains (1975), When the Clouds Clear (1990), If I Could Sing (2002), and This Way I Salute You (2004). He also edited The Word Is Here: Poetry from Modern Africa (1973). His work is included in the Beyond Words anthology, published by flipped eye in collaboration with Apples & Snakes.