Join us for a drink to toast the end of the festival, and hear from local poets Helen Jarvis (The Kindness of Water), Thuy On (Essence) and Es Foong.

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HELEN JARVIS is an award-winning poet who lives in Williamstown. In 2024 she was runner-up in the Gwen Harwood poetry prize; her writing has also won the Ada Cambridge awards for poetry and for biographical prose. Her first poetry book, ‘The Kindness of Water’, described by critic Felicity Plunkett as ‘dextrous and inventive’, has just been published by 5 Islands Press.

THUY ON is the Reviews and Literary Editor at online arts publication ArtsHub. She also has three collections of poetry published by University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP): Turbulence (2020), Decadence (2022) and Essence (2025).She is obsessive about books, cats, matcha, and Scrabble. Her favourite punctuation mark is the semicolon.

ES FOONG is a poet and performer living on the lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. They think and write about strange geographies of belonging, and the power of the pause to offer alternative ways of being. Their poems have appeared in Rabbit Poetry, Kalliope X, Best of Australian Poems 2022 and long-listed in the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize 2023. They’ve featured on stages including Queensland Poetry Festival 2022 and Canberra Poetic City 2023. On-stage, they are the poetic analogue of heavy-metal karaoke. Off-stage, they eat identity labels for breakfast. Their debut poetry collection “Clot and Marrow” is out with Recent Work Press.