Sydney N E W S : poets from the north . east . west . south

This special Contains Strong Language showcase features Sydney-based poets exploring new directions of engagement and performance in celebration of Red Room’s Poetry Month. Featuring Rico Craig, Willo Drummond, Gareth Jenkins, Teena McCarthy and Pooja Mittal Biswas.

The event is presented as part of BBC's Contains Strong Language and Poetry Month, in partnership with Red Room Poetry.

Sydney N E W S poets:

Pooja Mittal Biswas is the author of ten books. Her latest book is The Maker of Garlands (Vagabond Press, 2024), and her previous book, Hunger and Predation (Cordite Books, 2023), was shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier's Literary Awards under the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She has been reviewed and interviewed in The Age, The Australian and ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, and has been anthologised in both The Best Australian Poems and The Best Australian Poetry. Pooja has written for Writer’s Digest and has been widely published in literary journals such as Meanjin, Overland, Cordite, TEXT, Hecate and Jacket. She has won awards for her teaching of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney and Monash University, and has designed courses for Writing NSW and Writers Victoria. She has been invited to speak at literary festivals like the Emerging Writers’ Festival and the National Young Writers’ Festival.

Rico Craig is an award-winning poet, writer and educator. His poetry has been awarded prizes or shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize, Val Vallis Prize, Newcastle Poetry Prize, Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize and University of Canberra Poetry Prize. Bone Ink (UWAP), his first poetry collection, was winner of the 2017 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2018. His most recent collections Our Tongues Are Songs (2021) and Nekhau (2022) are published by Recent Work Press.

Willo Drummond is a poet, sessional lecturer, and supervisor in creative writing who lives and writes on Dharug and Gundungurra land. Her debut collection Moon Wrasse (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023), was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and commended in the Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry. In early 2024, Moon Wrasse was selected as one of 45 Australian titles to feature in the annual Aesop Queer Library. Willo has been the recipient of a Career Development Grant for poetry from the Australia Council for the Arts, shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award, the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award and runner-up in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize. In 2023-24 she co-edited, with poet Stuart Barnes, ‘Queering Ecopoet(h)ics’, a queer themed issue of Plumwood Mountain, an Australian and International Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics.

Gareth Jenkin's first poetry book, Recipes for the Disaster, won the 2019 Anne Elder award and was highly commended in the Mary Gilmore award. His poetry short-films have screened at festivals around the world and he exhibits text-based art and multimedia installations. Since 2005 Gareth has been building The Atomic Book—an online digital archive of the work of Australia’s greatest Outlier artist, Anthony Mannix.  In 2019 Gareth edited and introduced the selected writings of Anthony Mannix, The Toy of the Spirit. In 2020 Gareth founded the archive and small press Apothecary Archive where he publishes all manner of things experimental and creative. In 2021 he took over the running of one of Australia’s most enduring poetry publishers, Five Islands Press. His most recent book The Inclination Compass, Puncher & Wattmann culminated in an exhibition 2023.

Teena McCarthy is a visual artist and poet who works predominantly in painting, photography and performance art. McCarthy is an Italian/Barkindji woman who is a descendant of The Stolen Generations. Her work documents her family’s displacement and Aboriginal Australian’s loss of Culture and their ‘hidden’ history. In 2018, she was the inaugural winner of the King & Wood Mallesons Contemporary ATSI Art Award and a finalist in The 65th Blake Prize. Earlier, she was a finalist in the 70th year Mosman Art Prize and finalist in the 2014 and 2015 Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize. Bush Mary is her first poetry collection published by Cordite 2021.

The N E W S poetry program is an annual series of events, live-streamed @knox.live.  Presented by Poetry Sydney, partnered with The Knox Street Bar in collaboration with Dr Michelle Hamadache, Macquarie University.

Poetry Sydney acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation,  the traditional owners of the land where we live, create, meet and work.

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