POETRY READINGS
From home to the park - poetry from all over
04-06 November 2021
Throughout the festival
We are thrilled to feature 12 poets across the festival. The recordings will be available via our social media and through our events. You will view readings from Kate Lilley, Dylan Barrett, Hester Rook, Raynen Bajette Amos, Dion Fibishenko, Jesse Oliver, Margaret Thanos, Michael Louis Kennedy, Elisabeth Hansen, Angelita Biscotti, Maddie Godfrey and Quentin Brown.
Kate Lilley is a queer, Sydney-based poet, editor and scholar. She is the author of 2 chapbooks and 3 full-length collections of poetry: Versary (Salt 2002), winner of the Grace Leven Prize; Ladylike (UWAP 2012), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards; and Tilt (Vagabond 2018), winner of the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry. As an academic specialising in queer, feminist literary history and poetics, she was a full-time member of the English Department at the University of Sydney from 1990 to 2021 and is now an Honorary Associate.
Michael Louis Kennedy is a playwright and writer based in Sydney. He has previously worked for the Sydney Fringe, Summerhall (Edinburgh Fringe) and Belvoir Street Theatre. His work has been featured in Overland, Voiceworks, Brag, Going Down Swinging, Transportation Press, Baby Teeth, Sydney Morning Herald and more. As a playwright he has had readings and productions on the Sydney Fringe Festival, at the Old 505, Sydney Mardi Gras’s Playlist playreading festival, and Queer Theory in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2019 he was a member of ATYP’s Fresh Ink program for emerging theatre voices, and is currently part of Sydney Theatre Company's Emerging Writers Group, and undertaking a mentorship through Kill Your Darlings to develop a new Australian novel.
Margaret Thanos (she/her) is a Greek-Australian director and writer, who is most passionate about making intersectional feminist works. Margaret has written for many forms, including articles for 9Honey, Women’s Agenda and ABC Everyday. Last year Margaret was a part of Montague Basement's Playwriting Laboratory Program and this year she will be part of ATYP's Fresh Ink. She has also had published poetry. Margaret has directed The Goat, Jim Got Shot and Project XXX at SUDS and her short film Sugar High was shortlisted for the SUFF 48 Hour Film Fest. In 2022, she will be directing an original work Dark Moon at KXT PopUpstairs. Margaret is also an activist and she is one of Plan International's Activists for 2021. She is particularly passionate about gender equality, LGBTQIA+ rights, climate change and race equality. She hopes to use her art and voice to make the world a more equal place.
Dion Fibishenko is a Naarm based Queer Jewish artist. He is a multidisciplinary artist skilled in film, painting and writing. Currently finishing his final year studying directing at VCA, his stories explore his young queer identity, battles with mental illness and relationship with god.
Maddie Godfrey is a writer, poet, educator and emotional feminist who lives on Whadjuk Noongar land. Their debut collection ‘How To Be Held’ is a manifesto to tenderness. They have performed poetry at The Sydney Opera House, The Royal Albert Hall, St Paul’s Cathedral and Glastonbury Festival (2017). Maddie is the recipient of the 2020 Kat Muscat Fellowship, the 2021 Tom Collins Poetry Prize and the 2022 Varuna Poetry Flagship Fellowship. Recently Maddie was awarded a WA Youth Award for their “Creative Contributions” to Western Australia. Currently they are wearing a lot of purple while completing a PhD on prose poetry and rehearsed choreographies of womanhood.
Dylan Barrett is a queer Irishman who moved to Sydney last year (he doesn’t live in Coogee). His writing emerged from the storms of early bereavement and the forlorn closet. However, it wasn’t until the first lockdown that he began sharing his writing in the form of spoken word. This presented him with the opportunity to finally talk back to the things that frustrate him – usually the men that he kisses and the ones who call him a faggot for doing so. He hasn’t shut up since. His poem “These Sticks” won the audience award at the 2020 Bunker Spoken Word Competition, a national event held annually in Queensland.
Hester J. Rook is an Australian Shadows Award-winning and Rhysling Award-shortlisted poet, fiction writer and co-editor of Twisted Moon Magazine. They are often found salt-scrunched on beaches, reading arcane tales and losing the moon in mugs of tea.
Raynen Bajette Amos is an artist and writer, living and working on unceded Wangal Land. They work across film, movement, poetry and digital spaces, with a focus on relationality, place and cultural and politicised somatics. Their writing has featured in Red Room Poetry’s Writing Water, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, Dancehouse Diaries, Scum Mag, and elsewhere. Their visual poetry and electronic literature has also been published broadly, including with Backslash Lit and Mantissa Poetry Review.
Shruti Sareen (she/her), born and brought up in Varanasi, studied at Rajghat Besant School, KFI. Graduating in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, she later earned a PhD from the same university., titled “Indian Feminisms in the 21st Century: Women’s Poetry in English” which is now forthcoming from Routledge (UK) as two monographs in 2022. She has had over a hundred poems and a handful of short stories published in journals and anthologies. She is currently seeking publishers for her novel, The Yellow Wall, and is currently working around a hybrid manuscript around lives of queer artists, on themes of queerness and mental health. Her debut poetry Collection, A Witch Like You, was published by Girls on Key Poetry (Australia) in April 2021. She was an invited poet at the global poetry festival, hosted by Russia, Poeisia-21.