Poetry Soiree

Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor was awarded the 2018 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition, and the 2017 Monash Prize for Emerging Writers. Her poem ‘Instructions’ was named by The Spinoff as the best poem of 2018, and she took up The Spinoff Review of Books Writer-in-Residence Award at the start of 2019. Her work has appeared in Starling, Mayhem, Brief, Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Turbine, Mimicry, Min-a-rets, Sweet Mammalian, Sport and Verge. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Waikato. 

Barry Smith has been writing poetry in its many forms for about forty years. His work has been published in, amongst others, Poetry New Zealand, Takahe, Southern Ocean Review, Kokako, Haibun Today and several poetry anthologies including Nga Kupu: an anthology of Waikato poetry.

Carrie Cornsweet Barber has been writing poetry since she was seventeen; she was active in high school and college literary magazines in California and Pennsylvania, and then got distracted by matters of career and family life, writing poems between and about episodes of that ongoing saga.  In 2007, she and her family moved to New Zealand, and she was active in the Poets Alive group in Hamilton, won first and second prize in Wintec’s Poetry Day competition in 2013, and published in the University of Waikato’s Mayhem online journal.  She is currently emerging from a literary lull.  In her spare time, she is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Waikato.

Elaine Riddell is a Hamilton writer with a particular focus on haiku and tanka - short poems which have developed from ancient Japanese forms. The internet has enabled the growth of a vibrant international community of writers of modern haiku, tanka and other Japanese genres. Elaine has won a number of awards and her work is published in anthologies and journals in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Japan and North America. Elaine also writes mainstream poetry. She has work included in Nga Kupu Waikato: An anthology of Waikato poetry, ed. Vaughan Rapatahana  (2019).

Hayden writes poetry and short fiction late at night while his real life is asleep. He has been published in Mayhem, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Fragments and others. His work has been translated into Italian and published in the Italian Poetry Journal, Almanacco.

Dr Norman P. Franke is a New Zealand based poet and scholar. He has published widely about 18th century literature as well as German-speaking exile literature (Albert Einstein, Else Lasker-Schüler, Karl Wolfskehl) and eco-poetics. A member of the New Zealand PEN, Norman’s poetry has been broadcasted on radio and published in anthologies in Austria, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, the UK and the USA [2017/18 finalist at the Aesthetica (UK) and Feldkircher (Austria) literature contests; long-listed for 2019 NZ Flash Fiction Day competition and Takahē Short Story Competition, 2020 NZ Flash Fiction Day]. Recent poetry publications in Ariel (Würzburg), IthacaLit (Ithaca, NY), and FlashFrontier (Dunedin).

Peter Dornauf has published two collections of poetry: Metaphysical Midnight Cowboy Blues, (1913) and Every So Often, (1917). A new collection is soon to come out entitled, Story Time. He is also the author of two novels and six novellas as well as five non-fiction works, the most recent of which, Size Matters, (2019), is a history of cosmology and its impact on religious thought.

Stephanie Christie, the artist formerly known as Will, is curious about what words do. She makes page poems, collaborates on creative experiments and explores words as aesthetic objects.  She has performed poetry in festivals, shown text art in the Calder and Lawson Gallery, Studio One Gallery and Weasel Gallery, recorded poems for NZEPC Six Pack Sound, and was Poetry New Zealand’s 2019 featured poet. Her poetry collections are Luce Cannon, The Facts of Light, and Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter. Her current obsession is making word-based installations. She recently had three multimedia poetic works installed in the Mesoverse, an immersive art adventure in Hamilton.