Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Dr

Image Credit: Katlego Diseko

Dr Phillippa Yaa de Villiers lectures in Creative Writing at Wits University. She wrote Original Skin with Robert Colman, which explores her adoption and reunion with her Ghanaian biological father. Her poetry collections are Taller than buildings (2006), The everyday wife (2010) and ice- cream headache in my bone (2017). She co-edited The Poems of Keorapetse Kgositsile 1969-2018 for the African Poetry Book Fund (2023). Her fiction and poems appear in New Daughters of Africa (2019), Yellow Means Stay (2019), Relations (2023) among many others, including the journals Botsotso, Stanzas and New Coin. Her scholarly work has appeared in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on South African Poets (2019), Notes from the Body: Health, Illness, Trauma (2023), The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning (2024), and Fragments d’un temps suspendu: 44 lettres d’ecrivains sur le confinement (2025).