I am Mbali Vilakazi, an award-winning poet, performer and creative facilitator. My practice is inspired and informed by the ideas of ‘the personal as political’ and ‘the body as intervention’. As both witness and participant, I work with the specific intent to render visible the most invisible parts of our conversations, our communities and our humanity. I am a fragment of open still catching the light.

I TEDx because creativity is a vast and significant inheritance. Healing and transformative - it is a powerful and useful tool. It is something worth celebrating, and something worth sharing.

My idea worth spreading to present at TEDxCapeTown 2012 is that the process of creating poetry has certain principles that can be adapted into systems of living. Through the act of re-creating how we use language, we are able to re-create our very lives, we are able to reframe our experience of it. It offers us the opportunity to process and navigate the world differently. My talk is entitled 'The process is poetry / poetry is the process'.