Dr Raphael d’Abdon was born in Udine (Italy) and lives in Pretoria. He is a writer, scholar, editor, and translator, and reads poetry regularly in South Africa and overseas. His poems are featured in several national and international journals, magazines, and anthologies. He is the poetry editor of the literary magazine BKO and South Africa’s representative of AHN (Africa Haiku Network). He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and a Research Fellow at UNISA. His research focuses on spoken word poetry, poetic inquiry, and poetry therapy. His published works include sunnyside nightwalk (Geko, 2013), salt water (Poetree Publishing, 2016), the bitter herb (The Poets Printery, 2018), and Poesie scelte – Selected poems (2010 – 2020) (Besa, 2021).