By Trina Ankunda
From the moment I met her, it was not something ordinary! She had this vibe and enthusiasm and energy, I knew right away that she makes an impact somehow in our world today. After we exchanged contacts (actually, she took a colleague’s contact in my presence haha I guess that counts) as she gave us her business cards. I had never seen a card so beautiful, so creative and artistic! It was not the design on the card no, it was the profession and skills beneath! Creative Expression Educator | Poet | Author | Team leader at Rich
Diction Enterprises Ltd. My oh my! Her name is Beverly Nambozo Nsengiyunva.
Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva is a poet, author, and creative expression coach, as earlier mentioned, and the Founder of the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation, which promotes African poetry through awards, festivals, and publications. She is a joint first runner-up in the 2012 erbacce-press international poetry contest and holds a Master’s of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Beverley was the 2014 BBC Commonwealth poet from Uganda, and, in 2017, Founding President of Bukoto Toastmasters Club, a public-speaking and leadership platform. She coordinates annual poetry–nature series events, where poets recite and perform poetry around scenic spaces in Uganda and Africa in a way helping individuals and companies transform their communication using poetry, public speaking training, and Creative writing.
Journeying through her poetry, Beverly’s latest poetry collection is called “Dress me in disobedience” which was published by her very own Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation on 26th January 2022. This recent collection has gotten praise from people such as Kwame Dawes, a Ghanaian-Jamaican-American poet as it centers around women’s experiences, quoting; “Beverly Nambozo Nsengiyunva writes her poems with a daring, risk-taking, cutting and witty sense of defiance against those structures that constraint women and their capacity to find pleasure, dignity, creative expression, economic security and authority in a patriarchal world. The poems reveal a woman intensely of her body as it makes its way through a hostile world.”
In previous articles and interviews, the Ugandan poet is described as a literary activist who not only describes her work and the process by which local relationships have promoted her artistic growth, but also attempts to give space to these connections. Beverly is devoted to the literary world and her works are for sure an influence on betterness and growth.
