Teen Poetry Tent

Dr Denise Chapman is a counternarrative storyteller, spoken word poet, and critical autoethnographer who lectures in children’s literature, early literacy, and inclusive children’s media at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Chapman has served as a literacy specialist focused on critical media literacy in Australia, Fiji, and the United States. Denise uses oral stories, children’s literature, poetry, and digital images as counternarrative windows for social disruption and liberation. She is currently exploring preservice teachers experiences with diverse transmedia stories for children, and how teachers consider the impacts of diverse stories on children’s imagined possibilities. Collecting and analysing children’s literature, poetry, and short films centring the Global African experience serve as a favourite pastime for Denise.

Her most recent publication entitled 'The Crooked Room: Intersectional tap dancing, Academic Performing, and Negotiating Black, woman, Immigrant' is a critical poetic autoethnography that shares her wayfinding experience as an African American woman academic working in a White-privileged Australian university, trying to survive systems of oppression unacknowledged by those within the university space.

In an upcoming edited book by Dr Jeff Share entitled Ecowriting in Every Classroom, Denise discusses the freedoms and conscious-raising connections that stories lend to those experiencing oppression, as stories can help us fly.

I am a 13 year old boy from the Macedon Ranges. I play soccer and guitar and love the Beach Boys. I can’t say I like poetry because I have read all the books and the poets, because I haven’t read any. But what I like is how it can appeal to anyone regardless of experience. I like to have fun with my poems, with rhymes, different language and new topics.

Candy Bowers is an award-winning writer, actor, social-activist, comedian and producer. The co-artistic director of Black Honey Company, Candy has pioneered a fierce sub-genre of hip hop theatre that delves into the heart of radical feminist dreaming.

Born of multi-racial South African parents and raised in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, her life experiences have created a unique foundation to build her body of work upon. A poet, playwright and speaker from an early age, in 2001 Candy was accepted into the Bachelor of Dramatic Arts – Acting course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art.

Since then she has gone on to build her own company, star in sketch comedy, perform on Australia’s main-stages and tour the country with original works including: Sista She, Australian Booty, MC Platypus, Who’s That Chik? and Hot Brown Honey. You can also catch her on the small screen in Newton’s Law, Get Krack!n, Tonightly with Tom Ballard (ABC/Netflix) and The Cry (BBC.)

Candy is currently working on her first feature film with ArenaMedia, an anthology of Australian monologues for Actors of Colour called EVERYBODY ELSE, Twelve – a soul musical from the streets (after Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) and One the Bear – a fairytale for the hip hop generation heading to the Arts Centre Melbourne and Sydney Opera House in 2019.

Her awards and accolades include: Green Room Association Awards: Geoffrey Milne Contribution to Independent Theatre Award, British Council of the Arts Realise Your Dream Award, Australia Council of the Arts Cultural Leadership Fellowship, NIDA Glorias Fellowship, Creative Sydney Top 100 Creative Catalysts List, Philip Parsons Young Playwright Award Short List, Melbourne Fringe Best Performance and Director’s Choice Award and Adelaide Fringe Youth Education Award.