Lionel Fogarty / RMIT nonfictionLab reading

Poetryspective featuring Mary Stone and Sjaak de Jong & Citizens Band: Leonard Cohen retrospective

Poetryspective, a new poetry and spoken word event celebrates world poetry. Featuring one poet performing their own work, and one poet presenting the work of a poet who inspires them, with an open section that encourages not just the reading of original work, but the work of others that inspire them. MC’d by Lish Skec.

Alison Whittaker / Murrispacetime

Alison Whittaker reads ‘Murrispacetime’ as part Blakwork, 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.

Jennifer Compton / in the museum of the wars

Jennifer Compton performing ‘in the museum of the wars’, which received an Honourable Mention at The 2018 Melbourne Spoken Word Prize.

Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. When it comes to the poetry side of things she likes to have it every which way possible. She very much likes winning the Newcastle Poetry Prize and being given the big cheque. And she also very much likes the hurly burly of the open mic.