Hello! My name is Athenkosi Office. I was born near King William’s Town and I am 19 years old.

I am the young up-and-coming talent who will soon be exposed to the media. I define myself as the boy who is not afraid to create and compose something and make a name for himself to the reality of the world. I am passionate about dancing and writing poetry. What is so interesting about me is that I find my own way to connect the dance to poetry and express them in my own way. Furthermore, I would like to share with you something about my love of poetry and how it all started.

Mostly I am a boy who grew up in very hard and challenging times. So many things have happened to me and I had to face them on my own. I find this very challenging in my life. I have been through lots of difficult things, like losing my mother and people who are very close to me, so for me to deal with the pain I start to write it down in a poetic way and try to find and compose a dance out of it.

Poetry and dancing are the only ways I find easy to express my feelings, thought and views about something. Most of my poems, as you will see, are deeply emotional poems and they are truly from experience, meaning things that I have come across in my life.

I started to share my poetry when I decided to join Upstart in 2009. I am one of the Upstart founder members and I have had such a great time in Upstart since then. When I joined Upstart people started to know and recognise me as a poet and some were surprised when I told them everything I write is from experience. They never thought some things like that would happen to me because I look happy every day and they never see me suffering. And that’s true because I write everything down in a poetic way and by doing that I am being held inside my heart, so I would say poetry to me is like a medicine for the paint that I am going through.

I am also a dancer for the youth company from Rhodes University and I have been there for two years. Dancing and poetry are my life and my passion and they make me very patriotic and confident. No amount of glitter, of god or precious diamond stones or silver, can take away my love of poetry and dance.