Noémia de Sousa

Born in Mozambique, poet and newspaper editor Noémia de Sousa was educated in Brazil. Jailed briefly in Mozambique for her political activism, she later lived in Lisbon and France. She edited the women’s pages of the newspaper O Brado Africano from 1949 to 1951, and her poems were circulated in the mimeographed collection Sangue Negro (ca. 1951). One of the first African women poets to gain a wide literary audience, she often published under the pseudonym Vera Micaia.