To Breathe into Another Voice A South African Anthology of Jazz Poetry

"Given South Africa’s venerable jazz tradition, it’s perhaps surprising it’s taken so long for more fundis to be tapped for their responses to our kind of jazz. But it takes a special brew of ingredients for this kind of book to come together. You need an inspired guiding spirit, such as editor and jazzwoman-in-words Myesha Jenkins, and you need a vat in which the ingredients can mix and bubble. You’ll find everything here in To breathe into another voice: faithful and fantastical accounts of the jazz life and jazz people as well as reflections on the music as a metaphor for how we live – or, maybe more importantly, how we’d like to live. All you need to do now is open the covers, start reading, and dance joyously about the architecture." —Gwen Ansel

MoAfrika ’a Mokgathi is a poet, stage actress, playwright, saxophonist/ flautist (sometimes), award-winning radio presenter/producer, facilitator, businesswoman, event organizer … and she has many more skills in her talent hat. Ayanda Billie is a social critic, freelance writer and poet who published a poetry anthology in 2006, Avenues of my Soul. Gary Cummiskey lives in Johannesburg. He is the former editor of Dye Hard Press, which he started in 1994. He is the author of several poetry chapbooks, the most recent being Don’t Stop Until Incinerated (Tearoom Books, Stockholm, 2016). Dr Raphael d’Abdon was born in Italy and moved to South Africa in 2008. In 2013, he edited the collection Marikana. Sedica Davids believes the world is indeed round with wide-open spaces for the imagination. She believes that the life energy contained in each body is powerful beyond imagination. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is the author of two collections of poetry and co-editor of No Serenity Here: An Anthology of African Poetry, which was translated into Mandarin. Diana Ferrus is a writer, poet, storyteller, and performer. She writes in both English and Afrikaans and has published two anthologies, one in Afrikaans (Ons Komvandaan); one in English (I’ve come to take you home).