Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 23 October
6:15 PM - 7:30 PM
If poetry is enjoying a resurgence of interest right now, it's partly because spoken word has given the whole art form a powerful shot in the arm, on both the stage and the page.
What's driving this renewed energy, and how are artists blending (and bending) genres and art forms? What are the links between music, spoken word and resistance? And how is the latest upswell of interest linked to First Nations storytelling and the groundbreaking spoken word movements of the past?
Hosted by Anne-Marie Te Whiu and David Stavanger, editors of the new anthology Solid Air: Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word, our third Group Texts event will feature electrifying local performers and practitioners of spoken word. Join us for an evening of conversation and performance.
Hares & Hyenas will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Anne-Marie Te Whiu
Anne-Marie Te Whiu (Ani) an Australian-born Māori who belongs to the Te Rarawa iwi in Hokianga, Aotearoa NZ. She lives on unceded Wangal Country. She is a cultural producer, writer, editor and weaver. Most recently she has edited Woven (Magabala Books), Tony Birch’s Whisper Songs (University of Queensland Press), Bebe Backhouse's More Than These Bones (Magabala Books) and Solid Air: Australia & New Zealand Spoken Word (University of QLD Press) which she co-edited. Between 2015 – 2017 Ani co-directed the Queensland Poetry Festival, and between 2019 - 2023 she worked at Red Room Poetry. Most recently she co-curated the 2024 Writers Programme for the Aotearoa New Zealand International Arts Festival.
She was a 2023 Carriageworks Clothing Stores Studio Artist recipient and in 2022 she was a recipient of The Wheeler Centre's Next Chapter program. She is a Creative Australia Fellowship recipient and has been awarded 2024 residencies at Bundanon and Varuna Writers House. Her poetry and short fiction has been published broadly across Australia and Aotearoa including Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Rabbit Journal, SBS Voices, Open Books, Tupuranga Journal, Another Australia anthology and more. Ani's forthcoming debut poetry collection titled Mettle will be published by University of Queensland Press.
View ProfileDavid Stavanger
David Stavanger is an Australian poet, performer, cultural producer, editor and lapsed psychologist. His first full-length poetry collection The Special (UQP) was awarded the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize. David is the co-editor of SOLID AIR: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word (UQP) and his latest collection Case Notes (UWAP) won the 2021 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry.
These days he lives between the stage and the page.
PiO
π.O. is a legendary figure in the Australian poetry scene, born and bred in Fitzroy, the great chronicler of Melbourne and its culture and migrations, a highly disciplined anarchist who worked as a draughtsman for forty years to support his art.
He is currently editor of the experimental magazine Unusual Work. He is a pioneer of performance poetry in Australia and the author of many collections, including Panash, Fitzroy Poems, Big Numbers: New and Selected Poems, and the two epic works 24 Hours and Fitzroy: The Biography. His book Heide with Giramondo won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry in the same year.
Laniyuk
Laniyuk is a Larrakia, Kungarakan, Gurindji and French writer and performer. She has been published nationally and internationally in poetry collections such as Solid Air (2019) and Fire Front (2020), in the 2022 speculative ...
Emilie Zoey Baker
Emilie Zoey Baker is an award-winning Australian poet and spoken-word performer who has toured nationally and internationally performing and writing. She was a Fellow at the State Library of Victoria, and has previously ...
Joelistics
Joelistics’ great gift is the crafting of common language into evocative turns of phrase. As a rapper, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, actor and advocate for diversity, he is recognised as a unique voice in the Australian music scene from his early seminal work with alt rap group TZU to working as a solo artist to the critically acclaimed theatre show In Between Two.
Fury
Bjork once said 'you shouldn’t let poets lie to you', but Fury writes poetry, which is a sort of lie, albeit the fun-for-everyone kind. Fury has written a book called I Don’t Understand How Emotions Work. It is a very good book; soft and tricky, like leaning your face against your favourite swan.
Eco!Slam 2019 Winners
Upani Perera, Zhoujing Chu, Neha De Alwis and Ruth Jarra are Year 11 students from Nossal High School who had the opportunity to compete in the 2019 Eco!Slam Poetry Competition. Coming in with only a tentative interest and vague idea of the workings of slam poetry, the four girls performed their poem without knowing what to expect. The girls each come from different cultural backgrounds but were raised in Australia, which led to choosing to speak on a topic that is valuable to them: how they fit into a country that is hugely different from their families’ homelands.