Sitawa Namwalie for All African Women Poetry Festival 2025

Sitawa Namwalie to be feted at All African Women Poetry Festival 2025

Sitawa Namwalie will be feted at the All African Women Poetry Festival in Nairobi, Kenya on Saturday, January 25, 2025.

The All African Women Poetry Festival was launched by the Emma Ofosua-founded Tuniq Africa in Accra, Ghana in 2023. It was aimed at celebrating African literature and literary legends, empowering African women, women of African descent, and the African Diaspora, educating the youth, and engaging with marginalized communities through sustainable events, programming, and projects. There was another successful edition in 2024.

For 2025, the third edition, the organisers have opted for events in two different cities across the continent with the first in Nairobi, Kenya in January and the second in Accra, Ghana in May. The Nairobi edition will be hosted at the Kenya National Theatre with those who attend getting an epic visual storytelling experience from a woman’s perspective through Poetry and Folklore.

This event will celebrate award-winning Kenyan poet, playwright, and performing artist Sitawa Namwalie known for her unique dramatized poetry performances which combine poetry and classical Kenyan musical traditions. The Nairobi-based artist is the author of Cut off My Tongue, performed in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and at the Hay Festival in the UK in 2009. In 2010, the Sundance Theatre Lab selected the show in the first East African Sundance Lab held on Manda Island.

Sitawa’s growing body of work includes non-fiction, short stories, dramatized poetry productions, plays, and musicals. They include Homecoming (2010), Silence is a Woman, (2014), Black Maria on Koinange Street and Room of Lost Names (2015), Taking my Father Home (2023), and Stories from the Capital of Broken Hearts (2024). She is preparing her first musical entitled, Escape the Musical for staging. She has been a Series Editor for the Storymoja Historical Fiction for African Children (SHIZU) book series, 2024.

So if you can, please go to the Kenya National Theatre tomorrow, January 25, and see one of Kenya’s leading artists and others starting at 4 pm.

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