Poets

Keorapetse Kgositsile was born on September 19, 1938 in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1961 Kgositsile was one of the first young members of the African National Congress (ANC) who were instructed to leave the country by the leadership of the national liberation movement.

After a year in Tanzania, where he worked on the Spearhead Magazine as Frene Jinwalla’s editorial assistant, Kgositsile got a scholarship to study Literature and Creative Writing in the United States. Since his first post at Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1969, he taught Literature and Creative Writing at a number of universities in the United States and on the African continent, including the University of Denver, Wayne State University, New School for Social Research, University of California at Los Angeles and the universities of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Fort Hare.