Cave Canem Foundation will host a Legacy Conversation with South African Poet Laureate Mongane Wally Serote on October 8, 2026, at its New York space, 65 Bleecker Street. The evening runs from 7 to 9 pm, with check-in beginning at 6:30 pm, and includes a reception following the main programme.

The event pairs an intimate reading of Serote’s work with a conversation led by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and Cave Canem Fellow Tyehimba Jess. Cave Canem’s Legacy Conversation series, established in 2001, exists to honor elder Black poets whose bodies of work have left a lasting mark on the field, and this year’s edition lands on a significant anniversary: fifty years since the 1976 Soweto Uprising, an event deeply tied to Serote’s own life and work.

Serote has spent decades as one of South Africa’s defining literary and political voices. He was involved in the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s and became an important anti-apartheid activist and writer before spending years in exile, where he rejoined the African National Congress underground and its military wing, uMkhonto weSizwe. His books of poetry and fiction span more than four decades, including Yakhal’inkomo (1972), No Baby Must Weep (1975), To Every Birth Its Blood (1981), Third World Express (1992), History Is the Home Address (2004), and Revelations (2011).

Cave Canem itself has spent nearly thirty years building the kind of infrastructure writers like Serote’s conversation partner, Tyehimba Jess, have come up through. Founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to address the underrepresentation and isolation of African American poets in the literary landscape, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit runs an annual writing retreat, regional workshops, book prizes, and public readings and conversations that connect Black poets across the diaspora with new audiences. What began as a gathering of 26 poets has grown into a fellowship of 500 poets and a wider workshop community of more than 1,000. In 2016, the National Book Foundation recognized Cave Canem with its Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

The programme is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Tickets are available now through Eventbrite.