Njeri Wangare is a multi talented Kenyan poet and performer, IT specialist and arts blogger.

Njeri’s love for the arts began at an early age through her appreciation of African culture. This, she found to be well expressed in many of the books that she started reading while still young and they have shaped the person she has now become.

She penned her first poem in 2004. Three years later she made her first attempt in front of an audience, performing her poetry. She is now among the most talented Kenyan poets and performers.

Moraa Gitaa, author of Crucible for Silver and Furnance for Gold, was born, bred and raised in the port city of Mombasa, Kenya’s second largest city. She has lived and worked in the coastal beach town all her life and only recently moved to Nairobi where she is a fulltime writer and is working on plans to initiate an organization that provides books for disadvantaged children residing in informal settlements and those challenged by dyslexia, a condition that had challenged her daughter.

She attended the Aga Khan group of schools in Mombasa and studied Administration and IT at the Coast College of Commerce.

Nemwel Atemba, Author

AbaGusii Wisdom Revisted

Nemwel Mogere Atemba (author of Abagusii Wisdom Revisited - available from Nsemia Inc. Publishers in Spring 2010)  was born in 1956, to young peasant parents at Boking’oina village in the then larger Kitutu Location,  in the then Kisii district. He relocated to Nyansiongo settlement scheme in 1965 and after school in 1977, moved to Nairobi for training and employment, where he has resides to date.

He went to school at Tambacha and Nyansiongo primary schools, Nyanturago Secondary school (where in 1975, he set a record of being the very first student in the school to attain a Division one (1) in the “O” levels). He proceeded to Machakos Boys High School, Eastern province where he passed his “A” levels well in 1977. Thereafter, he taught for two years at Manga Girls High School before joining the Kenya Railways Corporation for training in Management and Administration fields.

Okemwa’s childhood was unique, riddled with poverty, despair and loneliness. Out of school most of the time, due to fees, he sat on an ant-hill outside their rural home watching the colours of the rainbow on the rural sky. On fine days he would run about with other boys of similar circumstances to catch grasshoppers and butterflies in the vast fields next to the river banks while, at the same time, watching the orange rays of the setting sun slowly sinking in the western horizon. During market days Okemwa would sit with other little boys beside the road and watched people carrying their wares to the market, counting the number of vehicles that drove by, while making faces and gestures at children who accompanied their parents to the market. With no basics in life, and being brought up with just a mother, Okemwa didn’t enjoy the life other children in the neighbourhood had. In the poem Gong, he vividly captures the true texture and feel of his childhood:

The GONG

Of my childhood rings louder

Its echo hurtles in, faster

Catching up with me

Every night in my dreams

The bicycles, donkey-carts

The farmers’ open vans

Raced up and down this pebbly road

Leaving behind trails of dust

I sat here, on this anthill

On a market day

Counting people, donkeys

I was a loner then

The mantis as my teddy bear.