Poetry Africa is an annual international poetry festival curated and presented by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban each year during October. The festival features Spoken Word & Publish Poets in performances and dynamic engagements which includes panel discussions, campus and school visits, poetry exchanges, book launches, open mic sessions and the ever popular slam jam competition.
Poetry Africa has, under the lead of Karen Ijumba, created a digital map of all the poets and performances that they have hosted since 1997. Karen Ijumba is working with us to link Poetry Africa’s metadata to our database. This metadata includes around 600 individual poets, information about their works, lives, and performances and even links to extant published works and works online. We are also using Poetry Africa’s database to model festival data.
ALMEDA’s Gloria Ajami Makokha held a Majina ya Khanga/Leso Awareness and Publicization Drive at Kenyatta University’s Mombasa Campus on 23rd December 2025, funded by the British Institute in Eastern Africa’s Impact Grant Award. The event, in which Makokha’s research findings from field work in the region were shared with her…
Ashleigh Harris and Nicklas Hållén will both present their recent research at the “Lost & Found” Archives and Multilingualism in the (Post)Colony, to be held at the University of Liège on 12 January. Ashleigh will address how the ALMEDA project is working on a multilingual ontology for its knowledge model…
ALMEDA case researcher Erik Falk, visited Kampala and the site of FEMRITE, Uganda Women Writers Association, 17-26 November to collect data on the organisations formal and informal publications. FEMRITE, which will celebrate 30 years of work in 2026, is active across the literary field by organising poetry clubs and writers’…
Our Annual Report for 2025 is available here: