NATALIA MOLEBATSI is an internationally known South African writer, poet, and singer. In addition to being a performance poet and author, she experiments with jazz and hip hop. Her CDs, Come as you are: Poems for Four Strings and Natalia Molebatsi & The Soul Making are a fusion of poetry and a variety of music styles. She has published Sardo Dance through Ge’ko and edited We Are: A Poetry Anthology through Penguin books. Her work is anthologised in among other books, Letter to South Africa: Poets Calling the State to Order, Happiness the Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, New Coin, and the Anthology of World Poetry (2010) among others.
Natalia has performed poetry and facilitated creative writing workshops at high schools, universities and festivals in Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya, Zimbabwe, England, Italy, Azerbaijan, Argentina, Palestine, Germany and the USA, among other countries. Molebatsi is a PhD student in Performance Studies. She is a Pan-African feminist and queer poet, writer and cultural worker from South Africa. Natalia is the editor of We are: A Poetry Anthology (Penguin, 2008) and Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems (forthcoming from Penguin Random House and Cassava Republic Press, 2021).
Her writing is included in, among other journals, Scrutiny2, Rhodes Journalism Review, Agenda, Muziki and the National Political Science Review. Her MA thesis (through the University of South Africa) entitled An Analysis of Representations of Women in SAfm’s Poetry in the Air, focused on a critical discourse analysis of womanist cultural production on public radio. Her BA (Hons) work focused on the representation of Black women’s hair in television advertisements. Her research interests include feminist media inquiry; Black queer and feminist performance and poetry in theatre as radical (intersectional) feminist intervention. Natalia has performed poetry and presented creative writing workshops in over 15 countries