She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the biracial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa.
"[5] De Villiers was born at Hillbrow in Johannesburg, South Africa,[6] where she spent the first months of her life in The Princess Alice Home, a facility for adopted babies.
Although their relationship was tempestuous and marked by long separations, de Villiers credits her adoptive mother Hertha Lilly Amalia nee Graf, an eminent physical anthropologist,[8] with the love of poetry as well as believing in her talent as a performer.
The story of their relationship, and a broader exposition of Yaa's complex racial identity, appears in Darwin's Hunch,[9] Christa Kuljian's expansive exploration of race and science.
[14][16] In 2005, de Villiers won a mentorship with English poet John Lindley through the British Council/Lancaster University's distance learning scheme "Crossing Borders".
[21] According to Tolu Ogunlesi's review for Wasafiri magazine, "Yaa de Villiers' silence-smashing poems (in this manner reminiscent of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife) are sensitive, unafraid to be erotic, sometimes tragic, and always irreverent".
[24] Her poetry and prose are widely published in local and international journals and anthologies, including The Edinburgh Review, Poui, A Hudson View, Crossing Borders 3,[10] We Are... (ed.
[14] In 2007, de Villiers appeared at the Word Power International Festival of Black Literature in London, England, and Poetry Africa,[16] and in April 2008 at the "Together for Solidarity" conference in Sweden.
[46] In September 2016, she joined the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF), an organization that promotes and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts of Africa, alongside Kwame Dawes, Chris Abani, Gabeba Baderoon, Bernardine Evaristo, Aracelis Girmay, John Keene and Matthew Shenoda.
[47] In 2017, de Viliers was commissioned to guest-edit a special edition of The Atlanta Review, focused on South African woman poets, with contributors including Myesha Jenkins, Jolyn Phillips, Makhosazana Xaba, Ronelda Kamfer, Vangile Gantsho, Francine Simon, Karin Schimke, Lebogang Mashile and Arja Salafranca, among others.
[48] In January 2023, the University of Nebraska Press published the volume Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969–2018, edited and with an introduction by de Villiers and Uhuru Portia Phalafal.