Welcome back to the September 2025 chapter of the Sydney Poetry Lounge, featuring poetry from Alasdair Carter and Lou Steer and our incredible open mic! Join us upstairs at The Glebe Hotel for a night filled with powerful spoken word performances and heartfelt poetry.

$10 entry, $5 concession, tickets available on the door or via Humanitix.

15 x 2-minute open mic slots available, sign-up at the door from 6:30pm.

Alasdair Carter

Alasdair Carter is a multi-award winning performance poet and a battle-scarred nurse. Alasdair sings bedside poetry on hospital wards and debrides wounds on carpeted stages. He writes and performs about what he knows and what he knows is good hand hygiene. With clean hands and honest stories; Alasdair hopes to heal heart-ache, recover trauma, and bandage his suffering with beauty.

Alasdair is a frequent open microphone night opener and poetry slam regular. He is the winner of the Nimbin Performance Poetry Cup, KV Folk Festival Reciter of the Year and the B&B Slampionship. Alasdair has featured and facilitated workshops for Bankstown Poetry Slam, Poets Out Loud, B&B Slam, Vocable Poetry, Canberra Slam, That Poetry Thing, Poetry At Your Place, Enough Said Poetry Slam, Ruckus Slam, West Words, Word Travels and won a gold star for a poem about a pig in primary school.

Lou Steer

Lou Steer is cabaret poetry diva. Her performance highlights include performing to 100,000 people at Newtown Festival. She has performed at many festivals including Sydney Fringe Festival, Newcastle Fringe Festival, and Maitlaind IF Indie Writers Festival.

Lou’s debut poetry collection Fierce was published in 2025 by Girls on Key Press.

In 2024, she was a guest poet at the 7th Boao International Poetry Festival in Thailand.

In 2024 and 2025, she was an alumni judge of Sydney Fringe Festival and finalist judge of NSW Poetry Competition

In 2023, she was awarded a grant by Inner West Council to write and produce her hour long play A Pocketful of Fierce Violets, which she performed with her performance group Fierce Violets at EDGE Sydenham and Sydney Fringe Festival.

Since 2022, she has co-presented and produced Close to Home on Radio Skid Row 88.9 FM

She was the convenor of Caravan Slam, the largest poetry slam in Sydney’s Inner West, from 2015 – 2018.

Her poems are widely anthologised and have been translated into Chinese and published in New York, New Zealand and India.

Fierce is her first poetry collection. Starting with Love and progressing through Woman/Goddess, Grief and Body, Lou expresses the fierce joy and pain of being alive. She explores her emotions through her vibrant storytelling, imagery and wordplay. In Lou’s world, fairy tales and myths come to life, and love and beauty will always overcome heartbreak.