Professor Mongane Wally Serote is a Black Consciousness icon, poet and writer. His poems speak of the realities of apartheid and have been invaluable in provoking thought about oppression, as well as capturing the truths of the era. He is the chairman of the Jacana Literary Foundation, has founded several NGOs and sits on advisory boards with the aim of promoting matters of arts, culture, indigenous knowledge and African renaissance.

Rustum Kozain is a poet, reviewer, essayist and short fiction writer. He is the winner of the Nelson Mandela Poetry Prize (1989); the Philip Stein Poetry Award (1997) for a poem that appeared in New Contrast (1996); the Ingrid Jonker Prize (2006) and Olive Schreiner Prize (2007) for This Carting Life; the Tomas Pringle Poetry Award (2003); the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English literary work across all genres (2013); and the Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry once again in 2014 for Groundwork. Groundwork is his latest volume of poetry, published in 2012.

Athol Williams has published four books of poetry and over 100 poems in literary journals worldwide. Among his literary awards are two Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Awards (2015 and 2016) and the 2019 Cultural Affairs Award from the Western Cape Government for his contribution to the literary arts.

Goodenough Mashego is a 360 degrees artist and cultural worker based in Mpumalanga. He has published three volumes of poetry: Journey with Me, Taste of My Vomit, Just Like Space Cookies, and one collection of essays: How to Sink the Black Ball. In 2016 Mashego released his first audio project of an invented genre he terms 'muse-tree', titled Just Like Space Cookies-Listening Sessions Volume One. Mashego is co-founder of Mpumalanga's indigenous language hip-hop label, Lepulana Musik.

Pieter Odendaal is a South African poet, performer, translator and editor. He is currently busy with a practice-led PhD on spoken word poetry in South Africa. He is the director of InZync Poetry, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the growth of performed poetry in all South African languages. His debut Afrikaans poetry collection, asof geen berge ooit hier gewoon het nie (like no mountains ever lived here), was published by Tafelberg in 2018. Odendaal is the co-editor of the multilingual poetry translation anthologies Many Tongues (2013) and ConVerse (2018), both of which aim to promote an awareness of poetry in indigenous South African languages through translation. He is also the poetry editor at Kabaka, a newly formed literary magazine for LGBTIQA+ voices in Africa.

Dr Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi is an associate professor in the Department of African Languages at the University of the Witwatersrand. She teaches African-language literatures, black film studies, popular culture, oral literature and visual culture. She is the author of African-language Literatures: Perspectives on isiZulu Fiction and Popular Black Television Series, a timely critical intervention into the aesthetic hiatus in the field. She has published extensively on aesthetics, literature, black opera, popular culture and broadcast and print media in South Africa.

Dr Sponono Katjie Mahlangu is a researcher, educator, part-time lecturer, translator, interpreter, author and editor in isiNdebele. She is the Head of isiNdebele Dictionary Unit housed in the African Languages Department at the University of Pretoria and teaches the following modules at the University of Pretoria for both undergraduate and postgraduate students: translation, semantics, dialectology, lexicography and editing.

Aubrey Neo Sehlahla is a graduate in African languages and political studies from the University of the Witwatersrand. Having completed his honours degree in linguistics, he is currently doing his master's studies in African languages with his focus on film and drama production in African languages. He has been a judge for the 2016/2017 Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature, reviewing manuscripts in Xitsonga and Tshivenda. Neo has worked as a freelance structural editor and translator in publishing.