About Me

I am a Namibian creative writer, researcher, and lecturer whose work sits at the intersection of creative nonfiction, memory studies, and postcolonial African literary history. Rather than treating research and creativity as separate practices, I create knowledge through literary forms. I conduct auto-ethnographic investigations into personal narrative, archival materials, and family history to deepen my creative work. My doctoral memoir, Being When Meant Not to Be, traces the long shadow of the Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia through personal narrative, archival research, and family history. It is a book about growing up in a country whose darkest history was invisible to me. The German street names, the statues, the language lessons all went unnoticed until, at the age of twenty-eight, I learned about the genocide, and the wool came off my eyes. What followed was a reckoning: with my country's history, with my own identity, and with the Herero heritage I carry through my mother. A Fulbright Junior Staff Development Fellow, I hold a PhD in English (Creative Nonfiction) from Binghamton University, State University of New York, where I also taught undergraduate Academic Writing and Creative Writing for five years. I am currently a Lecturer at the University of Namibia, teaching Literary Theory and Introduction to Creative Writing. Before my doctoral studies, I taught English at the secondary school level in Namibia for six years and contributed to national curriculum development at the National Institute for Educational Development. My current project is a collaborative memoir written in close partnership with my father. It is a reconstruction of his life growing up under South African apartheid administration in Namibia, and is written from his perspective. His is a story of faith, gentleness, and survival: a boy who learned German in an army tent, taught by a Portuguese schoolteacher serving the apartheid regime, who grew up to become a social worker. It is also, inevitably, my story. My work has been published in Global Memories of German Colonialism (Hamburg University Press), Praxis: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques, HerStry, the Center for Humans and Nature, and Windmill: The Hofstra Journal of Literature and Art. I have presented at the Art and Representation of Genocide Conference in Berlin and at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Annual Conference. I am a recipient of the Fulbright Junior Staff Development Grant, the Kaschak Fellowship for Social Justice, the Link Fellowship for Creative Writing, the Global Memories of German Colonialism Fellowship, and the Graduate Excellence Award in Research from Binghamton University, among others.