Miriam Tlali (born 11 November 1933) is a South African novelist. She was the first black woman in South Africa to publish a novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, in 1979. She was also one of the first to write about Soweto.
Miriam Masoli Tlali was born in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, and attended St Cyprian's Anglican School and then Madibane High School. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand until it was closed to Blacks during the apartheid era; she later went to the University of Roma, Lesotho. She left there because of lack of funds, and became an office clerk.
Tlali's first book, Muriel at Metropolitan (1979; originally called Between Two Worlds), is a semi-autobiographical work and its "viewpoint is a new one in South African lite
Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press 2024). His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
Michelle Peñaloza is author of two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015), and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). Her full-length collection, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, which recently won the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize, will be published in Fall 2019 . Her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, upstreet, Vinyl, and The Collagist, with poems forthcoming in The Normal School and Third Coast. Michelle is a Kundiman fellow, and a former Made at Hugo House Fellow. She is the recent recipient of the 2019 Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award for Poetry from The Key West Literary Seminar, as well as scholarships from VONA Voices and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, among ot
