Arielle Cottingham / Irony

Poetry at Lentil: On Election

Pay-as-you-feel restaurant, Lentil As Anything, located in the old nuns dining hall at the Abbotsford Convent, is hosting a monthly open mic poetry night based on a changing theme. An inclusive space for seasoned and amateur poets alike. Sign up on the blackboard from 5.30pm, the event begins at 6pm with 5 minute slots during dinner service.

Alison Whittaker / A love like Dorothea’s

Alison Whittaker reads ‘A love like Dorothea’s’ as part Blakwork, a reading for the Melbourne Visiting Poets Program, at The Wheeler Centre in August 2018.

Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi poet, life writer and essayist from Gunnedah and Tamworth, north-western New South Wales. She now lives in Sydney on Wangal land, and is recently returned from the US, where she received a 2017 Fulbright Indigenous Postgraduate Scholarship to complete a Master of Laws (LLM) at Harvard. Her poem MANY GIRLS WHITE LINEN received the Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2017. She is the author of Lemons in the Chicken Wire (Magabala Books), the debut collection that established her as a powerful new voice in poetry.

Her next book, Blakwork (forthcoming from Magabala), is a stunning mix of memoir, reportage, fiction, satire and critique. Blakwork is an original and unapologetic collection from which two things emerge: an incomprehensible loss, and the poet’s fearless examination of the present.

Sharifa Tartoussi / On blood and handprints

Sharifa Tartoussi performs ‘On blood and handprints’ at Slamalamadingdong in October 2018 at The Melba Spiegeltent.

Sharifa A Tartoussi is a dentist, poet and performer. She is involved in several creative projects, most notably becoming half the founding party of GriffinSpeak; a spoken word event that creates space for voices from marginalised groups around Melbourne. Her style has been described as teetering on the boundary between the fire that warms and the fire that burns with a mix of traditional storytelling, millennial boundary pushing and raw emotion with influences from eastern and western art and literature owing to her traditional Arab upbringing in a western climate. She released her first Chapbook “ColourBlind” in early 2018.