Tjawangwa Dema

CONTACT:
Website: tjdema.com

BIO:
Tjawangwa Dema is author of The Careless Seamstress, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize. Her chapbook, Mandible, was included in the first ever New-Generation African Poets box set series and her 2022 eco-poetry collection, an/other pastoral, was a finalist for both the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize and the Luschei Prize.

An arts administrator and teaching artist, Tjawangwa holds an MA  in Creative Writing and previously co-produced an edition of the Botswana - Sweden poetry exchange, a pan african poetry audio recording project as well as the Africa Writes Festival in Bristol. She has received fellowships, support and residencies from institutions including the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Danish International Visiting Artist program as well as Arts Council England. 

Tjawangwa is Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand and has carried out literary/arts research for the University of Bristol’s Arts Management and Literary Activism project as well as the National Arts Council of Botswana.  Her mentorship of emerging, often young, writers spans programs such as the Lancaster University/British Council's Power in the Voice Program to the University of Iowa International Writing Program's Women's Creative Mentorship Program.

TJ has given readings and facilitated workshops in well over twenty countries in settings ranging from youth prisons to magnet schools, community-based programs to university workshops for students and faculty. 

A consummate collaborator, Tjawangwa's poetry has been dropped from a helicopter over London, interpreted as video, dance, theatre and music. Her poetry has mostly recently been translated into German and Portuguese. 

She lives in Madison.

PUBLICATIONS:

an/other pastoral, NoBindings 2022 / AgaMotse 2025.
The Careless Seamstress, University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
Mandible, Slapering Hol Press, 2014.
Meuterin, Parasitenpresse, 2022. (German translation)
A costureira descuidada, Fosforo Editora, 2022. (Brazilian Portuguese translation)

Poetry

Inheritance

children know everything is a forest
  they think of men as stories
open their faces to each passerby
  as they do to the thick-knee’s warble
at the end of childhood they’ll not ask
  they’ll take what they know from learning
what comes of their blood-bright coats
  flickering in the woods
a small growl squatting on evening wind

even their father who turns his blank face
  into their song
is a forest
  children learn its woodland ways
to lie on bare floors prostrating
  until the wolf is gone
they learn to hear his foot’s tenor
  twigs snapping away beyond the eye

at night
  they lie awake and imagine
their mother’s face opening like a child’s
  waiting to be transformed
a muffled song on her lips
  not much to it
they’ll be wolves or they’ll be men
  turn to prophecy and devour their mother
or castrate their father while he sleeps

Black Bear in the Grocery Store

here we are in Thousand Oaks –
cypress trees in the grue distance –
milk in one hand and the other out-
stretched
fetching
when we are stupefied in the land of plenty
of aisles and aisles of having
what is canned   bottled   preserved   fresh
all must be paid for
in this tiled valley of dead things
between steel streams full with multi-coloured plastic
and paper packages and tin flowers
and below the m&ms and loo roll and ramen
a black bear – barely a yearling – so hot
she cannot calibrate sleep
maw open
she places paw
before paw
her bow-legged limbs all limber and lank
her cinnamon snout bearing low
in search of –
I make a list –
bird food and garbage
water and same-day salmon
here
in this counterfeit den
with its cool cool weather
she moves
that we might see her and do more
than spill our cold milk