Toni Giselle Stuart

“in the water, ordinary citizens 
become scientists and the children, 

of people forcibly removed,
return to learn again that 

the sea is our home too.” 
_{- from: Ocean Home} 

Toni Giselle Stuart is a South African poet, writer and spoken word artist and educator. 

With her poetry, Stuart aims to heal inherited and ancestral wounds and traumas as well as regain access to ancestral wisdom and gifts, bringing herself and her audiences closer to who they are. She is especially interested in discovering, re-imagining and rewriting the forgotten and buried histories and ‘herstories’ of mixed and creole South Africans and people of color. Furthermore, she seeks to connect these stories to the bodily experience, nature and the interplay of the two. In her live spoken word performances, she uses sounds and breath to create tension and emphasis. 

Stuart collaborates and performs across disciplines with filmmakers, musicians, visual artists and dancers. In 2016, she collaborated with South African filmmaker Kurt Orderson to create an audiovisual installation of her work Krotoa-Eva’s Suite, a Cape jazz poem in three movements. The piece was part of the exhibition Re(as)sisting Narratives which showed at Framer Framed Gallery in Amsterdam, and the District Six Homecoming Centre in Cape Town. Furthermore, she was the founding curator of Poetica at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town and founded the youth poetry programme Athlone Young Poets in Cape Town in 2018. In 2013 Stuart was named in The Mail and Guardian’s list of 200 inspiring Young South Africans. She has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, such as Looking Back, Going Forward: Young Voices on Freedom (2004).