Poets to mark Marechera’s 59th birthday

March 21 at the Book Café.
The day is set aside to promote reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world.
Some of the finest poets to emerge in Zimbabwe include Albert Nyathi, Mbizvo Chirasha, Memory Chirere and Ignatius Mabasa.
This year’s celebrations will also coincide with the “Dambudzo Marechera Celebrations”, an event organised by Flora Veit-Wilde together with various other authors, poets, publishers, academics and admirers of the late great poet.
Marechera put Zimbabwe on the world literary map with his vibrant writings like “House of Hunger”, “Black Sunlight”, “Scrapiron Blues” among others that made him an outstanding if not eccentric writer and poet.
This year’s World Poetry Day will be used to mark Marechera’s 59th birthday and it is being organised by the Dambudzo Marechera Trust.
Writer and editor, Ivor Hartmann who runs the trust is expected to compile an anthology entitled “Remembering Marechera” that will carry poems, short stories, essays and reviews, among others, that will be based on the life and times of Marechera.
StoryTime Publishing will release an electronic version of the anthology on 4 June 2011 Marechera’s actual birth-day.
However, all roads will lead to the Book Café at Fife Avenue Shopping Centre in the capital where an event to celebrate the occasion has been put in place.
This will see both established and budding poets taking to the podium to recite their poems while others will be reading from their published works.