Patron
Rose van Son
International Poets
Rena Priest (USA)
Freya Daly Sadgrove (NZ)
National Poets
Peter Boyle (NSW)
Tamryn Bennett (NSW)
Local Poets
Amy Lin
Barbara Temperton
Maree Dawes
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Colin Young
Patron
Rose van Son
Rose van Son is a well-published Western Australian writer and poet; her poetry collections include Cloak of Letters, Nature’s Warehouse, Birds in Focus; from the open doorway; (haiku) Three Owls and a Crescent Moon, Out on a Limb, an Exhibition; Labyrinth in Sandfire; Three in the Campagna, (with Glen Phillips and Rita Tognini); She has written poetry and children’s book reviews. Rose is a Haiku Selector for Creatrix Haiku online; and WA representative for Australian Haiku Society. She has an Honours Degree in Creative Writing & Literature, Curtin University.
Her poetry has been published in The Canberra Times; Glasgow Review of Books; Rabbit Journal; Cordite; Westerly; Australian Poetry journal; AJP Anthology, JAAM 33 (New Zealand); Grieve; Locus; Mundaring Poetry Awards, the Heron’s Nest (USA), Landscapes (ECU), Lane Cove and KSP Poetry anthologies.
She has won prizes in the Australian Catholic University Awards, Tom Collins Poetry, Ethel Webb Bundell, Peter Cowan Poetry, Kaleidoscope and Australian Haiku Society Haiga-Kukai Haiku. Winner of Bronze Quill 2019 & 2021 (Creative non-fiction) and UWA Art Essay, 2019.
Rose van Son has featured in a number of radio interviews and podcasts and has participated in various exhibitions and performances. In 2021 she was a featured guest poet at the York Inaugural Writers Festival and the New Norcia Writers Festival.
International Poets
Rena Priest
Unfortunately Rena has had to withdraw from appearing at PPF2022
WAPoets is excited to be hosting an international special guest poet for our Festival, in partnership with The Washington State Arts Commission (ArtsWA) and Humanities Washington, and with the assistance of a grant from the U.S. Embassy Canberra and Perth Consulate, Public Affairs Section.
Rena Priest is a member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. She is the incumbent Washington State Poet Laureate and Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writing Fellow. Priest is also the recipient of an Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award and fellowships from Indigenous Nations Poets and the Vadon Foundation. Her debut collection, Patriarchy Blues, received an American Book Award. Her second collection, Sublime Subliminal, was published as the finalist for the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her most recent book, Northwest Know-How: Beaches, includes poems, retellings of legends, and fun descriptions of 29 of the most beloved beaches in Washington and Oregon. Priest’s nonfiction has appeared in High Country News, YES! Magazine, Seattle Met, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Rena’s official website can be found at https://www.renapriest.com/
Examples of Rena’s work can be read online at https://adozennothing.com/2021/03/01/rena-priest-march-2021/
Freya Daly Sadgrove
Freya Daly Sadgrove is a writer, performer and theatremaker living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Newsroom called her “the wildest, most dazzling performance poet in New Zealand”. She has a Master of Arts in Poetry from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and her work has appeared in various publications in Aotearoa, Australia and the US. Her first poetry collection, Head Girl – described by Hera Lindsay Bird as “ruthlessly apologetic and dangerously sentimental” – was published in February 2020 with Te Herenga Waka University Press.
Freya trained extensively in theatre with Long Cloud Youth Theatre and PlayShop Performance Company between 2010 and 2016. Over the past eight years, she has worked with several Wellington theatre companies and collectives, most recently on such shows as Werewolf and Break Up: We Need to Talk (Binge Culture), and Massive Crushes and Me and My Sister Tell Each Other Everything (My Accomplice).
She is the director and producer of line-up poetry extravaganza Show Ponies, hailed by Ben Fagan of Motif Poetry as “a watershed moment for poetry in performance in Wellington”. She is currently working on her first full-length stage show, Whole New Woman, a hybrid of poetry, theatre, music and dance. It features several poems from Head Girl as well as a suite of new poems and songs.
National Poets
Peter Boyle (NSW)
Peter Boyle is a Sydney-based poet and translator of poetry. He was born in Melbourne in 1951 but moved to Sydney at the age of ten and has lived there most of his life. As a child he contracted polio shortly before his third birthday and spent much of his childhood in hospitals. In high school he developed his enthusiasm for poetry as well as for languages, studying French, Latin and Greek, and later German at University. After completing a Bachelor of Arts at Sydney University he worked for many years as a high school teacher and also travelled extensively in Asia, Europe and Morocco. In 1980 he lived for six months in Madrid before settling again in Sydney where he worked for nearly thirty years as a TAFE teacher. He married in 1987 and is the father of two children.
He is the author of ten books of poetry and eight books as a translator of poetry from Spanish. His most recent collections are Ideas of Travel (Vagabond Press, 2022) and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings (Vagabond Press, 2021). With MTC Cronin he is the author of two collaborative books of poetry: Who Was (Puncher and Wattmann, 2022) and How Does a Man Who Is Dead Reinvent His Body? The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli (Shearsman, 2008). His books have received numerous awards including the Queensland Premier’s Award for Apocrypha in 2010, the Adelaide Festival Award for The Blue Cloud of Crying in 1998 and the New South Wales Premier’s Award three times – for Coming Home From the World in 1995, for Ghostspeaking in 2017 and for Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness in 2020. He has performed his poetry at International Poetry Festivals in Canada, France, Colombia, Venezuela, Macedonia, Nicaragua and El Salvador. His poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Swedish, Macedonian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Russian. In 2017 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Prize for an Australian Writer.
In 2019 he was commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to write a poem responding to an art work in their permanent collection. This poem, ‘Stopping by piles of waste on sunny evenings’, was published in the AGNSW magazine Look and, along with several other ekphrastic poems, is included in Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings.
As a translator his books include Anima, Indole/Of Such A Nature and Carece de causa/No Known Cause by Cuban poet José Kozer, The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo and Three Poets: Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio and Jorge Palma. His translations of French poets, including René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, Yves Bonnefoy and Guillevic, have appeared in journals and anthologies in the US and the UK. In 2013 he was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Award for Literary Translation.
In 2018 Peter was awarded a Doctorate in Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney with a thesis on his heteronymous poetry and poetry translation.
Tamryn Bennett (NSW via video)
Unfortunately Tamryn is unable to attend in person and will present via video.
Tamryn Bennett is a poet, artist and Director of Red Room Poetry. Her book phosphene is published by Rabbit Poet Series. A second collection, icaros, is forthcoming with Vagabond Press. She is the editor of Líneas en tierra / Lines in land a bilingual collection of Mexican poetry published by Australian Poetry.
She has developed numerous national and international collaborative projects that actively engage communities in conservation, creation and systems change. These projects span New Shoots: A Garden of Poems (VIC, NSW, WA, QLD, UK), Extinction Elegies rewilding the spotted quoll, Plant Symphony recording and exhibiting bio-emissions of plant communication, and Poem Forest which plants a tree for every student nature poem received. Most recently, she has paved the way for the new national initiative Poetry Month (1-31 August).
Tamryn’s poetic projects are widely exhibited in Australia and internationally. She has held residencies include Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK), El Centro de Cultura (MX), Bundanon Trust and Wollongong Art Gallery (AU). Her poems, comics and essays have appeared in Covert Plants, Australian Poetry, Cordite, ImageText and Image [&] Narrative amongst others.
Tamryn has a PhD in ‘comics poetry’ from the University of New South Wales. She was awarded the 2018 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship and Australia Council for the Arts Professional Development Grant.
Local Poets
Amy Lin
Amy Lin (née Hilhorst) is a Perth-based writer who completed her PhD on mental illness in Australian poetry, specifically in the poems of Francis Webb, Bruce Beaver and Michael Dransfield. Amy’s thesis examined the relationship of the poetic mode in representing experiences of acute psychiatric distress, including the experience of being institutionalised in a psychiatric ward. Amy has presented her PhD research at Universities worldwide, including Harvard, University at Buffalo, University of Queensland, and University of Southern Queensland. She is currently working towards a scholarly monograph based on this research, and has written an essay for Cordite on the use of humour in portraying psychosis in Australian poetry.
Amy’s own poems have appeared in Westerly, Cordite, Social Alternatives, Verity La, Grieve and Axon. They focus on exploring place through the lyric mode, and she also has a strong interest in ekphrastic poetry and prose poetry. In 2020, Amy was commissioned by Westerly Magazine to write poems in response to queer art exhibition, A Sorrowful Act, at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.
Amy interviews Australian poets regularly for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and has interviewed Australian writers for the Centre for Stories Between the Lines series. Amy has appeared as a panellist on prose poetry at the Australian Short Story Festival at the Centre for Stories, and has interviewed writers and festival directors before live audiences. She also is a keen reviewer and has reviewed poetry collections for Australian Book Review, Westerly, Rochford Street Review, and other places. Amy has begun to dabble in prose with her first creative non-fiction story, ‘Some Strange Light Parade’, published on Centre for Stories Journal in 2020.
Amy has performed her poetry at Perth Writers Festival, Voicebox, Australian Short Story Festival, and at UWA Publishing’s Sturmfrei Poetry Night. She was on the committee for the Australian Short Story Festival in 2018. In 2015 Amy judged the Work and Tumble chapbook competition, and in 2020 she judged the Out of the Asylum Spilt Ink Poetry Competition. She has guest edited for Westerly magazine for the Crossings special issue, which featured writing by postgraduates from University of Canberra and University of Western Australia. She also co-guest edited the Australian issue of Enchanting Verses Literary Review and has edited the books of fellow doctoral students at UWA. In 2020 Amy was a mentor for the Centre for Stories Inclusion Matters programme, where she gave one-to-one feedback to emerging writers on fiction and poetry.
Amy has taught fiction, film and poetry at the University of Western Australia. She is also a qualified lawyer and has worked in Local Government, Community Law, and the Union sector.
Barbara Temperton
Barbara Temperton finds inspiration in the diverse landscapes and stories of Western Australia. Having roamed about the metro area and in dramatically different regions of the State: the Pilbara, Ashburton; Mid West; Wheatbelt, and Great Southern, she is now happily settled in beautiful Menang Noongar country Kinjarling (Albany) on WA’s far south coast.
Barbara has actively engaged with writing since the early 1980s. In addition to poetry, she has also published short fiction, reviews and non-fiction articles, co-written plays, songs, won awards, and freelanced as an editor. Her activities have ranged from teaching in tertiary institutions to working as a Writer-in-the-Community with groups as diverse as survivors of family violence, men’s groups, people with disabilities, members of isolated communities, and new writers.
“The Snow Queen Takes Lunch in the Station Cafe” was Barbara’s first poetry collection to appear in book form. The book Shorelines, published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1994, also included collections by Michael Heald and Roland Leach. Going Feral, Barbara’s first solo collection, won the 2002 WA Premier’s Book Award for Poetry.
In 2007, Barbara completed an MA in English at the University of WA under the supervision of the distinguished poet and academic Dr Dennis Haskell. Fremantle Press published her MA project, a collection of long narrative poems based on local legends and history, as Southern Edge: three stories in verse in 2009. A maquette version of one of these poems, “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife”, won a second Tom Collins Poetry Prize for Barbara in 2005 and since then has appeared in seven publications.
Ghost Nets, her current work in progress, has taken ten years to write. It is a collective elegy for love, loss, and the environment. Some of the poems in Ghost Nets were featured in Australian Book Review’s – States of Poetry (WA) in 2016, published in The Weekend Australian, and the literary journals Westerly, Indigo and Hecate, amongst others.
Barbara was Westerly Magazine’s poetry editorial advisor from 2009 to 2011 and is a WA Poets Publishing editorial board member. She is also a librarian and, in more recent, pre-Covid-19, times worked in administration and records management roles, skillsets that have proved to be very handy for a poet with a paper fetish.
Barbara comes to the Perth Poetry Festival fresh on the heels of her appearance at the Denmark Festival of Voice for the Music of Poetry project. Live spoken word performances occurred in tandem with the World premiere of Aqueous – water : longing : memory. Aqueous is an audio-visual installation incorporating the work of WA poets Barbara Temperton, Kim Scott, Maree Dawes, Tim Dunn, and Yann Toussaint in collaboration with the esteemed musician/composer/producer Marianthe Loucataris.
Maree Dawes
Maree Dawes was raised in the wheatbelt, and now lives on the land of the Menang people where she can see and hear the Southern Ocean. Her early memories of words include listening to her parents read to her and family story telling.
Maree’s first collection Women of the Minotaur (Tactile Books 2008) explored the lives of mistresses in Picasso’s life. It was featured on ABC’s Poetica in May 2009. Her verse novel BRB which dives into online life in the nineties was published digitally by Spineless Wonders in 2014 and was re-released in print in 2021.
Maree has collaborated with artists, dancers, composers and embroiderers and sold film options on one of her short stories. Her work has focused on external and internal landscapes; being in the natural environment and the emotional journey of being human. She has been published in national and international journals and anthologies
Maree has honed her writing skills through tertiary study, mentorships and residencies and was commissioned to write a series of poems as part of Red Room Poetry’s Clubs and Societies Project. She has been fortunate to belong to several writers’ groups, most recently the Albany writers who provide support, inspiration and insightful feedback.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Scott-Patrick Mitchell (SPM) is a WA based non-binary poet who is a guest on Whadjuk Noongar Land. SPM’s work appears in Contemporary Australian Poetry, The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry, Solid Air, Stories of Perth and Going Postal.
They have published a number of chapbooks, including the award winning songs for the ordinary mass (PressPress, 2009), The Rutting Season (Mulla Mulla Press, 2012) and This Is How We Heal (Hectic Measures Press, 2018). A seasoned performance poet, Mitchell has toured Australia over the past two decades with works that have fused language and minimal baroque to the 2015 one-person showcase THE 24 HOUR PERFORMANCE POEM. They are also a regular at Perth Poetry Slam.
SPM has won Coal Creek’s Literary Award for Poetry, The Creative Connections Poetry Prize, Melbourne Poets Union’s Martin Downey Urban Realist Poetry Award, The 2021 KSP Short Story Prize and The Wollongong Short Story Prize. Most recently, SPM was shortlisted for The International Googie Goer Prize for Speculative Prose, The Martha Richardson Poetry Award and The Red Room Poetry Fellowship in both 2020 and 2021. SPM focuses on building community through their work with Perth Poetry Festival and WA Poets Inc’s Emerging Writers Program.
In March 2022, Mitchell released Clean via Upswell Publishing, a poetry collection that takes the reader into the seething underbelly of Australia’s methamphetamine crisis.
They live with two black cats, Beowulf and Bones.
Colin Young
Colin Young is a poet fascinated by people, life, and the many moments of wonder and surprise. He writes about the environment, politics, sexuality, identity, and how people are marginalised by society. Besides more serious poetry, he also enjoys writing satirical poetry as a vehicle for identifying problems and initiating change. Having spent many years studying ancient Greek literature he has also written translations of some Greek poets, and is interested in mythology of all kinds. He also reads widely in French poetry. As a result he believes that there is more uniting humanity than dividing it, and respects all other cultures.
He is very interested in contemporary issues like the effect of social media on society, fake news, deepfake videos, mistrust of information, and the erasure of history. This includes facing facts head on, and stripping the veneer off shibboleths: challenging mistaken or distorted views about war, the treatment of indigenous people, and minority sexualities and lifestyles. Poetry for him is a means of exploring new avenues of thought, as well as inviting readers and listeners to enter new worlds of human experience.
Through the exploration of monologues and alternative viewpoint techniques, poetry can reach many more people and encourage empathy and the ability to live in other people’s shoes. Colin believes that poetry can give a voice to the voiceless.
Since 2019 he has been published in Creatrix with more than 10 poems on a wide variety of themes. He has also had 10 poems published in the book Becoming Known, and one poem in the anthology Grieve from the Hunter Writers Centre, both in 2020. His poem Lean on Me won first prize in the Creatrix Award for 2020.
From 2019 to 2021 he was part of WAPI’s Emerging Poets Program, from which he greatly benefited by meeting and making friends with several exciting local poets who shared their different techniques and themes with him. He is grateful to WAPoets’ continuing support and his first book of poetry “Between Stations” was published by WA Poets Publishing in March 2022.
The 2022 Perth Poetry Festival receives funds from Creative Partnerships Australia through the Australia Cultural Fund and is supported by;
