Books published by Impepho Press

Mahlangu's debut collection, written between 2015 and 2018, is undoing a house of silence. Her writing is too lived in to be naïve and somehow manages to remain untainted by the cynicism of growing up. If it is true that the artist is the child who survives, then this is the book that journey spat out. Surviving Loss is a gentle-urgent fight for breath and voice.

red cotton is an exploration of what it means to be black, queer, and woman in modern-day South Africa. gantsho interrogates being non-conformist in both a traditional-cultural-religious upbringing and a more liberal yet equally-oppressive urban socialisation.

DANAI MUPOTSA was born in Harare, and has lived in Botswana, the United States and South Africa where she is now based. She describes herself as a teacher and writer. Feeling and Ugly was largely written between 2016 and 2018, although some of the poems were written earlier or previously published in some form. The collection gathers the various statuses and locations she moves across, as daughter, mother, teacher, scholar and writer. From these places, many of the poems try to approach difficult feelings about what it means to "do politics" from an empathetic complexity. "I'm raging, sometimes that makes me petty" is one such example. The collection carries a set of standpoints, or willfulness about pedagogy, politics and optimism. And while she carries an attachment to a non-reparative, or negative affect across the collection, she closes in describing the work, or all of her work, as love poems. This collection is a long love letter to those who are wilful.