Welcome to my website! 

 

I’m a writer, scholar and facilitator, passionate about writing and its healing and transformative potential.

 

Writing for me is not only my profession, but a calling and vocation. I believe in writing as a form of activism and a way of healing ourselves and others. My books reflect these values.

 

And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women Novels as Feminism (Wits University Press, 2020) examines how Black South African women writers use fiction as a tool of activism, a black feminist praxis, and a way of transforming the self and society. It excavates the often-ignored intellectual contributions of Black women writers in South Africa, casting their novels as sites of theory production.

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I am also the author of Grace: a Novel first published by Modjaji Books in 2017, which tackles the taboo of gender-based violence. It won the University of Johannesburg's 2018 Debut Creative Writing Prize, and has been used in creative writing workshops offered to youth as a tool to discuss gender, sexuality and gender-based violence.

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Based in Cape Town, South Africa, I am a Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town.  Here, I teach and study Black diasporic women’s writing, Black South African women’s literature, and queer theory. I earned a PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2010, after joining the Department of Women’s Studies as a Fulbright Scholar. I am a proud alumna of the University the Western Cape, where I completed an M. Phil in  Women’s and Gender Studies, and of CPUT, from which I obtained a B.Tech degree in Journalism.

 

As a teacher I have developed interests and curricula in South African literature, transnational and intersectional feminist theory, and representations of race and gender. I have taught at a number of universities at home and abroad, including the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia, as well as the University of the Witwatersrand.