Xabiso Vili

BIO

Xabiso Vili is an award winning author, performer, TEDx speaker, New Media Artist and social activist. He is the Pretoria Spoken Sessions Slam League Champion of 2015/16, the Speak Out Loud Youth Poetry Competition Champion of 2015, the Word N Sound Poet of the Year 2014, 2015 and 2020, the Word N Sound King of the Mic for 2020 and a Hadithi Ya Afrika top 30 Storyteller 2020.

He has represented the Eastern Cape in the Lover + Another Regional Poetry Slam of 2011 and, in 2013, he won the Gauteng Regional Slam coming in 3rd at the National Slam. He came third in the 2017 National leaugue after standing head and shoulders above the other Gauteng competitors and came 2nd in the first Current State of Poetry One on One league slam of 2016.

Xabiso has also been invited to speak and perform on platforms such as Hello Ambassador and Goethe Institut’s Literary Crossroads. Xabiso has also been published online and in various anthologies including SACE High School Anthologies (‘08, ‘09 and ‘10), Black Communion, Poetry Potion, Badilisha Poetry X-Change, Sky and Dust,To Breathe Into Another Voice, Singing in the Dark and most recently Yesterdays and Imaging Realities and released his first collection of poems, Laughing In My Father’s Voice in August of 2018.

He is an internationally acclaimed poet having performed all over South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique as well as in Scotland, the UK, the U.S and toured his one man show Black Boi Be through India and his Re/Member Your Descendants tour of America was highly praised. He has also been in residency at Cite International Des Arts to bring the Augmented Reality component of Re/Member Your Descendants to life.

One of South Africa’s top poets, he strongly believes that art has a positive influence on community and thus is persistently working towards creating alternative spaces and stages for art to be shared in innovative ways. He is currently involved in researching and creating methodology for how the process of writing can be used as a tool for therapy and healing.

During the South African Covid-19 lockdown period, Xabiso performed and run various workshops online. He also started the #CovidPoetryCypher, which brings a long list of contemporary poets to perform under the same hashtag. He has released his African lounge and spoken word fusion album; Eating My Skin, created in collaboration with the Favela Ninjas in 2016 to great reviews which he has performed at festivals such as OppiKoppi and Smoking Dragon.

Having won the Digital Lab Africa Web Creation prize in 2019, Xabiso spent 2020 creating an XR poetry-audio-visual project called Re/Member Your Descendants, a digital art exhibition, which exhibited at NewImages Festival at Forum Des Images in Paris in June, 2021 along with a projection mapping project titled Chosi Chosi, projected onto the Saint Eustache Church. Both of these projects use new media to explore the relationship between ancestry past present and future turning reality into a magical space through the scope of magical realism.