Toni Giselle Stuart is a South African poet, performer, and creative writing facilitator. Her work is about listening for the stories that help us reclaim our ancestral gifts and wisdom so we can remember who and what we truly are. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, her poems are informed by this land where the Indian and the Atlantic Ocean currents merge, and the mountain rises out of the sea.
She has work published in Poetry (2022), Callaloo (2019); the anthology Our Ghosts Were Once People (ed, Bongani Kona, Jonathan Ball, 2021), as well as other anthologies, journals, and non-fiction books.
Performances and projects include Krotoa-Eva’s Suite, in collaboration with filmmaker Kurt Orderson (Amsterdam and Cape Town, 2016); Poetry, Paramedics and Film with filmmaker/health researcher Leanne Brady (2018); I Come To My Body As A Question with dotdotdot dance (UK & Sweden, 2016 – 2020); What the Water Remembers at Woordfees (2020); forgetting. and memory with vangile gantsho & Vusumzi Ngxande (2020), and Future for the Past, with Sites of Memory, a multi-disciplinary site-specific performance project in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Cape Town, that re-imagined Dutch – South Africa colonial and slave histories (2020—2022).
She was the founding curator of Poetica, at Open Book Festival. She has an MA Writer/Teacher (with Distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a 2014/2015 Chevening Scholar.
X: @nomadpoet