Nineteen women poets from five southern African countries have been brought together in Gathered Seams, a new anthology published by South Africa’s Modjaji Books as part of its #Woordeloos project.

Edited by Liliana Risi and Colleen Higgs, the collection brings together writers from Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi and South Africa, placing distinct poetic voices from across southern Africa in conversation with one another.

The anthology’s title points towards one of its central ideas: lives assembled from fragments. The poems move through family memory, motherhood, violence, work, grief, desire and survival, shifting between intimate domestic spaces and wider landscapes shaped by the social and historical realities of southern Africa.

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Yet Gathered Seams does not reduce African women’s lives to hardship. Grief appears alongside pleasure, violence alongside resilience and loss alongside the ordinary textures of everyday life. Its five-country scope also allows the collection to hold different histories, landscapes and identities together without presenting southern Africa as a single experience.

That regional perspective gives the anthology particular significance. African writing is often encountered through individual national traditions or through publishing markets outside the continent; Gathered Seams instead brings poets from across southern Africa into a shared literary space, foregrounding connections between neighbouring countries while preserving the particularity of each writer’s voice.

The collection is part of a longer history of women’s literary publishing in Africa. Modjaji Books, founded by Higgs, has spent nearly two decades publishing women writers, with a catalogue spanning poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

The #Woordeloos project takes its name from the work of South African poet Elisabeth Eybers, who became the first Afrikaans woman to publish a volume of poetry in South Africa. Her place in the project connects the contemporary anthology to an earlier generation of African women poets and to the linguistic histories through which southern African literature has developed.

Gathered Seams consequently works both as a collection of contemporary poetry and as part of a broader effort to document and connect women’s literary voices within Africa. Its writers remain rooted in their particular places and experiences while contributing to a wider conversation about memory, identity, history, relationships and survival across the region.

Gathered Seams is published by Modjaji Books as part of the #Woordeloos project.