Kwani? Open Mic – Tuesday 1st September 2009

Featured Poet: Kingwa Kamencu
Venue: Club Soundd
Time: 7 PM

Kingwa Kamencu is an award winning Kenyan writer and author of ‘To Grasp at a Star’. She writes widely in different genres. Her work has been published in ‘The Jambula Tree and other Stories’, ‘Sable Lit mag’ ( UK ) and by FEMRITE ( Uganda ) as well as in local dailies and magazines. She was a writer in residence in the 2008 Femrite Regional Women Writers Residence in Uganda and a participant of the 2008 Caine Prize writers workshop in South Africa . She will read from a poetry anthology she is working on, ‘My Soul Strives, my Body Craves’.

Her biggest influences in poetry are local poets Muthoni Garland, Bantu Mwaura, Shailja Patel, Tony Mochama, Ndanu Mungala, Njeri Wangari, Philo Ikonya, Khainga Okwembah, Jacob Oketch and Wanjiku Mwaurah among many other hugely talented others. Out of Kenya she has been influenced by Tupac Shakur, Bertolt Brecht, Leopold Senghor, Anna Akhmatova and Epictetan philosophies.

This will be an open mic reading cum going away poetry bash for Kingwa who leaves for Oxford University at the end of the month to pursue an MSc. in African Studies.

Open Mic slots are open from 6pm all are welcome to register.

Also get copies of Kwani? 05 part 1 Kwani? 05 part 2 and our latest Kwani-nis at bookstores and get the best of Kenyan Writing.

KARIBUNI

NB: We shall get something exciting to do.