That’s right, this Lost Shark is Melbourne bound again, and excitedly, this time around, I am heading out of the city to the beautiful town of Geelong for some Poetry & Conversation thanks to an invitation from Robyn Rowland. Robyn presents local, national and international visiting poets in the Poetry and Conversation series. Robyn was Deputy Chair of the Foundation Board of the Australian Poetry Centre and has established and curated the Poetry Salons at Glenfern. She has been a published poet for 40 years and her latest book of poetry is Seasons of doubt and burning: New and Selected Poems (Five Islands Press, 2010).
The next event will be held on Sunday August 12 from 3pm – 5pm at the Geelong Library and I am thrilled to be sharing the stage with Sydney based poet, Fiona Wright.
Fiona’s work has been published in The Age, The Australian’s Literary Review, Heat, Overland and in journals and anthologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. Her work was included in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2009 and 2010 (Black Inc) and the Toilet Doors Project (2004), and she was runner-up in the 2008 John Marsden National Young Writers Award. She was awarded an Island of Residencies placement at the Tasmania Writers’ Centre in 2007, developing a sequence of poems about Australians in Sri Lanka. Fiona also held an Emerging Writers’ Grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council in 2010. She works as Poetry Editor at Giramondo Publishing and holds the position of Publications Officer in the Writing & Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.
Fiona’s first collection of poems, Knuckled, (Giramondo Press) was published in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Prize for Poetry 2012. The poems range from the flooded towns of the Snowy Mountains to the burnt-out landscape of Victoria to the holiday beaches of coastal NSW.
Here’s Fiona reading as part of The Red Room Company’s Poems to Share Project:
So if you are in or around the city of Melbourne or the town of Geelong on Sunday August 12, come along… It will be the first opportunity to get your hands on a copy of my new book, The First 30 and other poems! But more on that soon…
