Poetica April 2024: Exploring the Self

Es Foong / Waffle Irongirl is a poet living on the lands of the Kulin Nation. Their poems have appeared in Rabbit Poetry, Kalliope X and the Best of Australian Poems 2022. They’ve featured on stages including Queensland Poetry Festival 2022 and Canberra Poetic City 2023. They are the desultory administrator of the Naarm-based poetry event listing website MelbournePoetry.com  They want you to know that you are a wild, precious and unique expression of possibility and you are cherished. Their debut poetry collection, “Clot and Marrow” is out now from Recent Work Press. They live online at waffleirongirl.com.

Tim Loveday is a multi-award winning poet, writer, educator and clown-lark. As the recipient of a 2021 Next Chapter Fellowship and 2022 Writing space Fellowship his work explores class, masculinity, rurality and climate collapse. Tim won the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award and the 2022 Dorothy Porter Poetry Award. His poetry/prose has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, The Griffith Review, Going Down Swinging, Cordite, Suburban Review, Mascara and The Big Issue, among many others. Notable features include Clementine Ford’s Conversations with men and Melbourne Spoken Word. A Neurodivergent dog parent, he is the verse editor for the Creative Hub of Extinction Rebellion and the director of Curate||Poetry.  Tim teaches Poetry and Performance in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing, RMIT. You can find out more about his work at: timloveday.com.

Caroline Williamson is a poet and editor born in London. She has also turned her hand to editing academic books, museum publications and a campaigning anti-nuclear magazine. Her PhD in Creative Writing looked at some of the ways that poets have examined climate change in their work, and included a verse narrative dealing with the lives of her coal-mining ancestors in south Wales. Her poems have been published in journals including Overland, Meanjin, Heat, Cordite and Rabbit, and several have been longlisted for the Newcastle Prize. She won the 2014 A.D. Hope Prize for the Best Postgraduate Essay presented at the conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for ‘Beyond Generation Green: Jill Jones and the Ecopoetic Process’. Her book ‘Time Machines’ was published by Vagabond Press in 2023.

Thabani Tshuma is a multi-award-winning Zimbabwean writer and performance poet currently based in Naarm. His work can be found in publications such as Dichotomi magazine, Next in Colour, CUBBY ART, Cordite Poetry Review, and ABC ArtWorks’ SLAMMED. Thabani is co-curator of Thin Red Lines and his debut collection was released in 2023 through Recent Work Press. Writing is the aperture through which he views the world and experiences self in relation to others.

Visual rating 50%: Events are partly subtitled or include dialogue, background music and/or sounds, so d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences can have some engagement with the event.

Aural Rating 100%: Entirely sound-based with no visual elements and can be fully experienced by blind or low vision audiences.