Vanessa Chisakula Aka Van-Van, is a multi-award-winning, unapologetic page, and Spoken word artist a women’s rights champion (Milead fellow 2019), who uses poetry as an activism tool. She is currently a Civicus Youth Action Lab fellow under gender justice and a Center for International Private Enterprise fellow with a commendable project on peaceful and free elections in the case on the august 12th 2021 Zambian general election.

She is co-founder and curator of a Pan-Africanist Social Movement called Word Smash Poetry
which promotes youth participation in governance issues using Art making her part of the pioneering voices in breaking the barriers between art and civil society organizations.

She has shared her creative works at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW66), titled
“The Heart of Resilience: The Climate Crisis as a Catalyst for a Culture of Equality”, UN HighLevel Global Conference on Youth-Inclusive Peace Processes, and at Girl Rising Earth Day’22 Commemoration.

Her celebration of Africa is in her 2020 poetry chapbook called Africana, which has been published in the women scream anthology 20’, published on PePeta Africa’s “our voices’ digital booklet and has an award-winning piece to her name for her piece on women’s rights titled ‘Her Place’.

Vanessa believes in democracy, leaning on its dependence on participation makes her believe young people who are the majority population and have a huge role to play in seeing to it that true democracy is realized.