The Open Culture Feminist Café is proud to host Stella Nyanzi in an event themed after one of her poetry books, “No Roses From My Mouth.’’ 

Stella Nyanzi is a Ugandan academic, activist, artist, and agitator currently living in Germany, where she is a scholarship holder in the Writers-in-Exile program at the PEN Zentrum Deutschland. She has a PhD from the University of London in medical anthropology, with a specialty in human sexualities. Her research focuses on family planning, sexual sub-cultures, masculinities, and queer African studies. She self-identifies as a radical queer African feminist scholar and activist.

Her activism focuses on menstrual poverty, women’s subjugation, and LGBTIQA+ rights in homophobic contexts. She writes dissident poetry critical of the government failures of president Yoweri Museveni. The writing of this poetry led to her being arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen months in a maximum security prison. 

Stella Nyanzi’s radical activism offers a powerful method of how to resist patriarchy, authoritarianism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and other systems of oppression. Her work continues to be instrumental in African feminist studies, feminist activism, and feminist movements around the world.

This Open Culture Feminist Café event will highlight Stella's work, and we will learn more about her continued resistance while in exile. She will also read a selection of poems from her books, as writing poems is an integral part of her fight against oppression and her way of inspiring a revolution.