> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://hiddenvoices.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Featured Author: Anele Malgas - URL: https://hiddenvoices.ghost.io/featured-author-anele-malgas/ - Published: 2026-09-24T13:24:28.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-24T13:24:28.000Z - Description: Anele Malgas's Still, I Opened explores the emotions we struggle to express aloud. Through intimate poetry about love, vulnerability, heartbreak, and healing, she gives a voice to feelings that often remain unspoken. - Author: Roberta Maretti - Tags: Featured Authors, Follow Hidden Voices *Finding the Words for What We Sometimes Cannot Say* Some emotions arrive before the words to describe them. Love. Desire. Heartbreak. Healing. Vulnerability. For South African poet and emerging writer ***Anele Malgas***, writing has become a way of sitting with those emotions rather than rushing past them. Her debut poetry collection, ***Still, I Opened***, invites readers into those quiet spaces where feelings are often difficult to name but impossible to ignore. --- ***About the Author*** ***Anele Malgas*** is a South African poet and emerging writer whose work explores love, vulnerability, heartbreak, desire, and healing. Her writing is drawn to the emotions that often remain unspoken, the moments that linger long after they have passed and the feelings we struggle to fully understand. Her debut collection, ***Still, I Opened***, is an intimate exploration of love, sensuality, heartbreak, and self-discovery. Through her work, Anele creates space for readers to sit with their emotions, recognise pieces of themselves, and find meaning in what is often left unsaid. --- ***Still, I Opened*** **Genre:** Poetry ***Still, I Opened*** grew from quiet moments of clarity, uncertainty, love, and healing. The poems were written across different periods of Anele's life, often emerging when she was experiencing emotions she did not yet have the words to express. Rather than trying to resolve every feeling, writing allowed her to sit with them. Through that process came a deeper understanding: loving another person can be beautiful, but learning to love and understand yourself can be just as liberating. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/39/5c/395cd0d1-81e7-48cf-b7f2-ae6b679e2276/content/images/2026/09/1000187635.png) --- ***Book Blurb*** > This is a collection of poems that were written during the quiet moments of clarity, some of these were written during moments of uncertainty. These manifested over different periods of time, where the manifestation of love, recognition and healing took place, in the moments where I finally allowed myself to sit with feelings, I didn’t always have the words for. > In trying to understand the whirlwind of emotions when it came to love, I came to learn that loving can be beautiful and loving yourself can be just as liberating. In the journey of this collection, I learned to sit with myself a little more than I used to, to feel a little more than I used to. > I had to search deeply and leave myself bare enough to be open. But in these poems of shifting from different emotions of love, sensual, heartbreak ... they carry something honest, and that’s healing. I didn’t write these poems to interpret anything perfect; I wrote them to feel what I couldn’t always say out loud. > If you find parts of yourself in these pages, then maybe that’s enough. > And still, I Opened. --- ***The Courage to Remain Open*** There is something particularly intimate about poetry: it can give language to an emotion before we fully understand it ourselves. For Anele, that process has meant becoming vulnerable enough to look inward, to acknowledge what she feels rather than closing herself off when doing so might seem easier. Her collection moves through love, sensuality, heartbreak, and healing not as isolated experiences, but as emotions that can exist side by side. A poem about love can carry uncertainty. Heartbreak can sit beside desire. Healing can begin while some questions remain unanswered. That honesty is central to ***Still, I Opened***. Anele doesn't claim to have every answer. Instead, she writes to understand, to feel, and to create space for emotions that deserve to be acknowledged. --- ***An Excerpt from Still, I Opened*** > I struggle > with this open verse > > Yes, I know the words of affirmation to confirm my love by heart > > But I struggle with this open verse > > My tongue loses direction, the stutter keeps the words at my throat > > While my mind screams its now or never > > So I let this pen spill these words on behalf of these sealed lips hoping to take space > > You want to hear the tone in my voice, the look in my eyes > > You want to read the body language of lies > > You find it inaudible when you read the little whispers I write in this open verse > > But please understand, I struggle with this open verse The excerpt captures something at the heart of Anele's collection: sometimes writing becomes the place where words can finally emerge when speaking them feels impossible. --- A First Collection, and a Beginning ***Still, I Opened*** is Anele's first published collection, but for her, it represents much more than simply having a book in the world. It reflects a period of learning to become more comfortable with vulnerability, emotion, and self-expression. She hopes the collection reaches readers who have struggled to put their feelings into words, to those who might recognise something of themselves within its pages. And perhaps that is one of poetry's quiet gifts: the discovery that an emotion we thought belonged only to us has already been felt, somewhere, by someone else. --- ***Where to Find the Book*** ***Still, I Opened*** is available through: [Read and find Still, I Opened](https://books2read.com/u/3JaJ1P?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) You can also follow Anele on Instagram: Follow Anele Malgas on Instagram --- ***Looking Ahead*** For Anele, this collection is only the beginning. She is excited to continue exploring different forms of storytelling and the many ways words can connect us. Whether through poetry or other forms of writing, her focus remains on the emotional spaces that make us human, and on finding ways to express what is so often left unsaid. ***Still, I Opened*** is an invitation to do exactly that: pause, feel, and perhaps recognise something of yourself along the way. Sometimes, being open is the beginning of healing. And sometimes, finding the words is the beginning of being understood.