Welcome!
A little history, to start with…
The Petlwana Journal of Creative Writing was established in 2018 by Petlo Literary Arts to provide a platform for creative writing in Botswana. It quickly became clear that there was room to expand the journal’s scope to include a wider variety of creative works, and thus attract a wider readership and a larger audience for Botswana writers and artists.
And so, after a year of planning and preparation, the Petlwana Journal of Creative Literature and the Arts was launched in June 2024. We hope the work in these pages delights and inspires you.
What’s in a name?
The petlwana (adze) is a tool similar to an axe, with an arched blade at right angles to the handle, used for cutting or shaping large pieces of wood. This suggests that every writer is a carver who uses words and imaginative power to fashion a world through their medium of choice. The writer is the able craftsman and the pen is the adze.
The Petlwana Editorial Board
Barolong Seboni
Seboni is a renowned poet, author, essayist, and former lecturer in the University of Botswana English Department. He has extensive experience in literature and media and has developed work for the stage and screen. His poems have been published globally and translated into several languages. He founded Petlo Literary Arts to cultivate a national literature in Botswana. His most recent publication is Nitty Gritty: The Book of Meanings, a collection of articles from his beloved satirical column, which ran for fifteen years in the Mmegi newspaper.
Cheryl S. Ntumy
Cheryl S. Ntumy is a writer and creative consultant with a background in media. She has published fiction in genres including romance, young adult and speculative fiction, as well as feature articles on a wide range of topics. She is part of the Sauútiverse Collective, which created a shared universe for Afrocentric speculative fiction and published the first anthology set in the shared world, Mothersound, in November 2023. She is represented by the African Literary Agency.
Sharon Tshipa
Sharon Tshipa is a fiction writer, researcher, development practitioner, and multimedia journalist based in Gaborone, Botswana. As far as fiction writing is concerned, she has stories anthologised in magazines such as: ODD Magazine, The Wagon Magazine, Brittle Paper, StoryMondo, Deyu African, Motsamai Magazine, Kola Magazine, The African Street Writer, and The Kalahari Review, among others. She has three fiction writing awards.
Gothataone Moeng
Gothataone Moeng is the author of the short story collection, Call and Response (Viking & Oneworld 2023) and a 2024 Whiting Award winner. Most recently, she was a 2023-2024 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was previously a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, A Public Space and the Oxford American, amongst others. She holds an MFA Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Mississippi.
Duduestang Rapitsenyane
Duduetsang Baatweng Rapitsenyane is an independent researcher with a passion for literature, issues of sustainability and earth justice.She graduated at the University of Botswana and majored in English, and Theology & Religious Studies. Her recent scholarly work is ‘Awakening the mother mind’: Exploring the relationship between ego and the climate crisis, published in HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, (2023, April 3) 79(3), 1-7. She continues to explore intersections of literature, theology, and ecological ethics in her ongoing research.
Petlwana Journal of Creative Literature and the Arts 