Karen Martin is a fiction writer, collage artist and professional editor. In 2010, she published her first stories in itch, a South African-based multimedia online journal. In 2011, she was awarded a fellowship to Syracuse University's three-year creative writing MFA program. In 2012, she was artist-in-residence at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. In 2013, she was awarded the Allen and Nirelle Galson Prize for Fiction by Stone Canoe, a journal that showcases artists and writers with ties to upstate New York. Karen has initiated and developed several projects for GALA, including Balancing Act, a book and exhibition of South African LGBTI youth life stories, and Til the Time of Trial, a booklet featuring the prison letters of LGBTI and HIV/AIDS activist Simon Nkoli. She is the co-editor of Sex and Politics, a collection of essays, memoirs and archival documents about the South African LGBTI rights movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. Makhosazana Xaba is a former writing fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) and is currently a writing fellow at the Wits School of Public Health. She is the author of two poetry collections: these hands (2005) and Tongues of their Mothers (2008). Her forthcoming debut collection of short fiction, Running and Other Stories, will be published by Modjadji Books. She is the winner of the 2005 Deon Hofmeyr Award for Creative Writing and holds an ma in Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand. Praise for the book: 'Queer Africa' is a collection of charged, tangled, tender, unapologetic, funny, bruising and brilliant stories about the many ways in which we love one another on the continent. The collection includes exquisitely written work by some of the great African writers of this century - K. Sello Duiker, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Beatrice Lamwaka and Richard de Nooy - as well as new voices that map out a haunting, intricate, complex Africa. Phrases like Wamuwi Mbao's 'She looks like you, when nobody's watching her' and Sello Duiker's narrator's 'gentle sadness that doesn't take you all at once' share with us not only the aftermath of sex, but moments where the world opens itself. In these unafraid stories of intimacy, sweat, betrayal and restless confidences, we accompany characters into cafes, tattoo salons, the barest of bedrooms, the coldly glinting spaces into which the rich withdraw, unlit streets, and their own deepest interiors. We learn much in these gloriously achieved stories about love and sex, but perhaps more about why we hurt and need one another. Gabeba Baderoon is an award-winning poet; her books include The Dream in the Next Body and A hundred silence.