graphics by Toto De Waele
International
Natalie D-Napoleon (California, USA)
Twitter and Instagram: @nataliednapo
Website: www.nataliednapoleon.org
National
Peter Bakowski (Melbourne, Vic)
2019 represents Peter Bakowski’s 36th year of writing poetry. He has been writer-in-residence in Paris, Rome, Labastide Espaïrenque, (Southern France), Macau, Suzhou (China), and throughout Australia. He has given hundreds of poetry readings and poetry workshops. Peter writes clear accessible poetry and his poems continue to appear in print and online in literary journals worldwide. No matter how many books he writes in his lifetime they’ll all be about what it’s like to be a human being.
Melinda Smith (Canberra, ACT)
Melinda Smith is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Goodbye, Cruel (Pitt St Poetry, 2017). She won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call and her work has been widely anthologised and translated into multiple languages. She is based in the ACT and is a former poetry editor of The Canberra Times.
Local
Dean Meredith
Raconteur, apparently; provocateur, maybe; clown prince of, improper; juggler of vulgarities; loser, extraordinaire; pants, mostly up; chicken thigh nibbler; scribbler of sorts; purveyor of, fine thoughts; executor of (dis)taste; other aspects fade; a paisley mind, conjuring mischief; red rocking, luminously; like a fool, with a maybe; tomorrow, irreverent; yeah, that could be it.
Shey Marque
Shey Marque is an emerging poet from Perth. Her poetry has been recognised in various competitions and appears in major literary journals including Award-Winning Australian Writing, Cordite Poetry Review, Meanjin, Overland, Southerly and Westerly. She performed as part of The Big Read at The Queensland Poetry Festival in 2018 as the inaugural recipient of the Emerging Older Poet Mentorship Award. Her chapbook Aporiac was published in 2016 with Finishing Line Press (USA). Keeper of the Ritual, her first full-length collection, was shortlisted for the 2017 Noel Rowe Poetry Award, and is forthcoming with UWA Publishing in February 2019.
Ann Gilchrist
Ann is originally from Scotland. She came to Australia in her early twenties and is still infatuated with the ocean, land and sky.
She is a painter, poet and story teller. If you were to ask her, she would say she feels like a fraud, as often the poems and paintings shape themselves – it is the polishing of them that blisters her mind and torments the muse within.
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