About Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

My favourite poem:

Imagination

Imagination
Creates the situation,
And, the situation,
Creates imagination.

It may, of course
Be the other way round
Columbus was discovered
By what he found

James Baldwin.

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers
Bibliography: Taller Than Buildings (Phillippa Yaa de Villiers/Centre for the Book)
Poetry in anthologies: We Are … edited by Natalia Molebatsi 2009 (Penguin)
Prose: Just Keep Breathing, edited by Sandra Dodson and Rosamund Haden-2008 (Jacana)
Literary journals: Edinburgh Review Voices from Africa (2006), Poui Cave Hill Journal of English (Barbados, 2007)

Her one-woman show, Original Skin, which is an hour long poem reflecting on her life and South African society through apartheid performed at the Market Theatre, and the Grahamstown Festival. She performed poetry at the Women’s Festival and the Arts Alive Festival, both in Jo’burg and Darling’s Voorkamerfest in September 2008. She represented South Africa at the 12th International Poetry Festival in Havana, Cuba, and at Word Power Festival in the UK, as well as Poetry Africa in 2007, and in 2008 at Solidariteit in Sweden. She won the runner-up best writer award and the audience appreciation award in the Pansa Festival of Contemporary Theatre Readings in 2005, whilst completing Crossing Borders, a distance learning mentorship scheme initiated by the British Council and Lancaster University. She has written for Backstage, Tsha Tsha, Thetha Msawawa, Takalani Sesame and Soul City among many other television shows. She collaborated with Swedish writer Charlotte Lesche and Pule Hlatshwayo to write Score, which was broadcast on SABC and Swedish Television. She won a grant from the Centre for the Book in November 2006, and published her first volume of poetry, Taller than Buildings, which is now in its third edition. She was a member of the Theatresports company for ten years. She lives in Troyeville with her son and too many pets.

links to poems online besides Book.co.za:

http://www1.freewebs.com/theptg/phillippayaadevillier.htm
www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/exp-warehouse/TeaIsForThabo/
www.poefrika.blogspot.com/2007/09/come-back-afrika-by-phillippa-yaa-de.html
http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/Story.aspx?id=1671〈=1&g=0
http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/Story.aspx?id=552〈=1&g=0
http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/edinburghreview/er118.html