Mavis Smallberg has been a member of cultural collectives such as Vakalisa and the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), who raised awareness through poetry and performances at anti-apartheid events from the early 1980s.She participated in poetry performances such as “Culture in Another South Africa” in Amsterdam in 1989 and the women’s poetry collective Women’s Educational and Artistic Voice Expression (WEAVE), a group who self-published their ground-shifting mixed-genre anthology, Ink at Boiling Point, in 2003. Mavis was one of the founder members of Malika Ndlovu’s poetry collective And the Word Was Woman, who showcased their work in poetry performances during the late 1990s. Mavis’s work has been published in several national and international anthologies: A Gift of African Thoughts (2000), Women on War: An International Anthology of Writing from Antiquity to the Present (2003), Women Writing Africa (2003) and Imagination in a Troubled Space: A South African Poetry Reader (2004). She is a qualified heritage practitioner who wrote the text for exhibitions at the Robben Island Museum for 12 years. She is currently retired and writes poetry in-between developing her permaculture garden. Mavis received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the South African Literary Awards in 2025.