Constellations Festival Poetry Reading

A gathering of leading poets who will read from their own work and from the work of oppressed and politically censored writers from around the world. Hosted and curated by Mike Ladd, a well-known South Australian poet who presented Poetica on ABC Radio National for two decades.

Authors:  

Ali Cobby Eckermann (Internationally awarded poet and Yankunytjatjara grandmother)

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara grandmother, poet and Stolen Generations survivor. Her poetry is influenced by her love for her people and red sand country. . . the first collection little bit long time was written in the desert and launched her literary career in 2009. In 2014 Ali attended the International Writing Program in Iowa USA and won the inaugural Windham Campbell Award for Poetry from Yale in 2017. Her latest release she is the earth won the NSW Literary Book Of The Year award in 2024.

Arantza Garcia Ferrand (Peruvian-South Australian poet and winner of the 2025 National Poetry Slam)

Arantza is a Peruvian writer, living and performing on Kaurna Country. She’s an organiser and co-host for The Gathered Sound, a poetry open mic platforming the voices and experiences of poets of colour. She’s also the 2025 Australian Slam Poetry Champion.

Heather Taylor Johnson (South Australian poet and novelist who is co-curator of the Dog Eared Readings)

Heather Taylor-Johnson writes novels, poetry and essays recognised in prizes such as the Readings Prize for New Fiction, ABR's Calibre Prize and Island’s Nonfiction Prize, and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. A recent South Australian Arts Fellow, she lives and writes on Kaurna land. Her latest books are Little Bit, a work of autofiction, and the just-released poetry collection I Lost Someone Then Found Them In My Body.

Jelena Dinic ( Writer in Serbian and English who won the Mary Gilmore Award for her first book of poems)

Jelena Dinic arrived in Australia in 1993 during the collapse of Yugoslavia. She writes in Serbian and English. Her poems and short stories have been published in literary journals and anthologies. In the room with the she wolf, her first book of poems, was winner of the 2020 Adelaide Festival Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award, and the Mary Gilmore award in 2022. Her second book The Bridge has just been published by Wakefield Press. Jelena lives in the Adelaide Hills with her family.

John Coetzee (Nobel Prize winner and long time supporter of PEN International)

Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and the Booker Prize twice John Coetzee is a novelist, translator and critic. John is also a long-time supporter of Pen International, which campaigns of behalf of persecuted writers all around the world.

Natalie Harkin (Narungga poet and Research Fellow, winner of the John Bray poetry award)

Natalie Harkin is a Narungga poet and creative arts-based Research Fellow with the Critical Indigenous Studies team at Flinders University, Kaurna Yarta. She is passionate about archival justice, engaging archival-poetic methods to document community Memory Stories, and Indigenous Living-Legacy archive innovations for our time. Her books include Dirty Words (Cordite Books, 2015), Archival-poetics (Vagabond Press, 2019), and APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA (Wakefield Press, 2025).

Maxine Beneba Clarke (renowned poet, short story writer and author of children's books)

Maxine Beneba Clarke is one of Australia’s most celebrated poets. She is the author of over fourteen books, including the bestselling memoir The Hate Race, the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the Victorian Premier’s Award-winning poetry collection Carrying the World, the ABIA award-winning poetry collection It’s the Sound of the Thing, the Kate Greenaway Medal longlisted illustrated poem When We Say Black Lives Matter and the CBCA honour book The Patchwork Bike, which also won the Boston Globe Horn Prize for Best Picture Book. She was the inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence at The University of Melbourne.

Host: Mike Ladd

Mike Ladd is a South Australian poet, essayist and nature lover. He has published ten collections of poetry and prose, including the natural history Karrawirra Parri, Walking the Torrens from Source to Sea. Mike was the editor of ABC Radio National’s Poetica program, which ran for eighteen years and brought Australian and international poetry to a wide audience. His most recent book is Now Then: New and Selected Poems published by Wakefield Press in 2025.

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