Modjaji Books has released Gathered Seams, a poetry anthology gathering nineteen poems from women writers across Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa. Edited by Liliana Risi and Colleen Higgs, the collection was published as part of Modjaji’s #Woordeloos project, marking nineteen years of the press’s work centering women’s voices in southern African literature.

The poems move fluidly between languages, geographies, and registers, carrying readers from kraals to mine dumps, through grandmothers’ hands and mothers’ absences, past wooden spoons and stillborn lullabies. What unites them is a refusal to flatten experience into a single register: the collection holds violence and survival, grief and magwinyas, side by side, resisting any impulse to reduce a woman’s life to her trauma alone. Notably, the anthology deliberately gathers voices across the very borders that xenophobia works to harden, a quiet but pointed act of solidarity built directly into the collection’s structure.

The project’s name is itself a tribute. Woordeloos borrows its title from a poem by Elisabeth Eybers, the first Afrikaans woman to publish a volume of poetry in South Africa, whose legacy of formal precision and emotional candor echoes through much of what Modjaji has published in the decades since.

Founded and steered for nearly two decades by Colleen Higgs, Modjaji Books has built a reputation as one of southern Africa’s most consistent champions of women’s writing, publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from voices often overlooked by larger commercial presses. Gathered Seams arrives as both a milestone and a continuation of that mission, a nineteen-poem toast to nineteen years of insisting that women’s stories, across every border in the region, deserve to be told in their own words. The collection is available for order via Clarke’s Bookshop.