A recent addition to the Library’s National Poetry Month project

April is National Poetry Month, a time when the Library honors the poetic spirit of our own community by providing a virtual space for people to share poetry. We honor and feature poets who are both published and unpublished, whose poems reflect all poetic styles. This is our second year in providing this virtual space for sharing poetry, and, like last year, we’ve already had another great response to this project. We want to thank all the poets who contributed video and audio clips of their work!
We will continue to post submissions throughout April, so if you are a poet or a poetry lover and want to contribute, please send us a video or an audio file (up to 10 minutes) of you either reading your own work, talking about your work, or reading the work of a poet who has inspired you. Send your submissions to the project’s creator, Christina Continelli at: ccontinelli@ucsd.edu.

Our most recent submission is from Tendai R. Mwanaka:

(Tendai R. Mwanaka reads two poems–“Ode to Grief” and “I am the Only Needle“)
Tendai. R. Mwanaka is a multidisciplinary artist from Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. His oeuvre of works touches on literary disciplines (non-fictions, poetry, plays, fictions), music and sound art disciplines, visual art disciplines (photography, drawings, paintings, video,collage…) inter-genres and inter-disciplines etc… Voices from Exile, a poetry collection on Zimbabwe’s political situation and exile in South Africa came out from Lapwing Publications, Northern Ireland, 2010, Keys in the River, a novel of interlinked short fictions came out from Savant Books and Publications, 2012, Zimbabwe: The Blame Game, a book of creative non fictions on Zimbabwe came out from Langaa RPCIG, 2013. Forthcoming books include; Zimbabwe: The Urgency of Now (creative non-fictions) from Langaa RPCIG, A Dark Energy (full length novel) from Aignos Publishing Inc, Finding a Way Home (short fictions) from Savant. Work has been published in over 300 journals, anthologies and magazines in over 27 countries. Nominated, shortlisted and won some prizes and work has been translated into French and Spanish.