THIS year will go down as one of the most resourceful years for award-winning poet Lebo Mashile.

THIS year will go down as one of the most resourceful years for award-winning poet Lebo Mashile.

Mashile has done well since becoming a professional poet but this year things are really happening.

A performer, actress, presenter and producer, Mashile, the daughter of exiled South Africans, was born in the US.

Last week she performed in Grahamstown with Phillippa Yaa de Villiers and Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile. She will perform at Bloemfontein's Fifa Fan Fest on Saturday and at Nelson Mandela's flagship fund-raising event on Sunday.

She will perform with the Bala Brothers, enchanting jazz singer Judith Sephuma and the Soweto Gospel Choir.

Her inclusion as the only performance poet in this line-up is confirmation of her peerless standing. But that is not all. There is also a bun in the oven. Mashile is expecting her firstborn.

"This child was a surprise but so are most of the greatest blessings I have experienced from moving to South Africa to becoming an artist," she says.

Her recent shows in Berlin, Bremen, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, and the Black Forest were to promote this milestone in Mashile's already enviable career.

In many shows she shared the platform with author and activist, André Brink, regarded as one of South Africa's top writers.

She has also released audio versions of both her anthologies In A Ribbon Of Rhythm and Flying Above the Sky.