Derek Kannemeyer has spent much of his life being "not from around here." He lives in Richmond, Virginia, but was born in apartheid era South Africa. When he was six, he and most of his mixed race family fled Cape Town for London, England, where he grew up. After college, while working in Lille, in France, he met and married his American wife Sally; she towed him across the Atlantic, to Virginia, where he settled into a third nationality, and spent three and half decades teaching French, Creative Writing, and English at St Catherine's School in Richmond. In the margins of that life, he strove to be a multi-faceted creative.

During his teaching career, Derek found little time to follow through publicly on most of his creative concoctions, especially those of larger scale. He has now begun to pull things out of drawers, to polish them up, and to put them out into the world. There will be more to see. Perhaps, let us hope, a whole lot more. Watch, for example, this space.