Stories Behind the Stories
Description
Join Slam Poet and Author, Manveen Kohli, on Saturday, the 17th of January for an evening of creative bliss with three incredible writers:
Lisa Collyer
Kaya Ortiz
Tineke Van der Eecken.
This panel will explore a range of poetic themes, including, feminism, marginalisation, and migration. The evening will conclude with poetry performances from each poet, including Manveen Kohli.
Lisa Collyer
Lisa Collyer is an author of two poetry collections, Gold Digger (2025) and How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023) (the latter being short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award), and both published with Life Before Man Books. Her personal essay, Prolonged Exposure is published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage (2025) with Fremantle Press. Her poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’ was short-listed for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025). She was a recent artist in residence at Bundanon Art Museum (2025) where she created new work on climate grief.
Kaya Ortiz
Kaya Ortiz is a queer Filipino poet of in/articulate identities and record-keeper of ancient histories. Kaya hails from the southern islands of Mindanao and lutruwita/Tasmania and is obsessed with the fluidity of borders, memory and time. Starting out in nipaluna’s open mic scene in 2016, they have performed spoken word poetry and oral storytelling in nipaluna/Hobart, Ngunnawal country/Canberra, Tarntanya/Adelaide, and Boorloo/Perth. Since first being published in 2018, their writing has appeared in various online and print journals and anthologies, including Cordite, Portside Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Best of Australian Poems 2021, and After Australia (Affirm Press 2020). In 2024, Kaya won the Dorothy Hewett Award with their debut poetry collection Past & Parallel Lives, which was published by UWAP in 2025. Kaya currently lives, works and writes on unceded Whadjuk Noongar country.
Tineke Van der Eecken
Tineke Van der Eecken is a Flemish Belgian-born Australian multidisciplinary artist working across visual arts, environmental art and writing. Based in Walyalup (Fremantle, WA) she sees herself as a well-travelled migrant whose practice spans continents and forms.
Tineke has published in fiction, memoir and poetry. Her writing is shaped by the places that matter to her—lands marked by colonial histories—and explores the complexities of belonging, connection, and dislocation.
Her second memoir, Traverse, was shortlisted for the TAG Hungerford Award and follows her earlier work Café’d Afrique: A Personal Discovery. Her poems have appeared in Westerly, Blackmail Press, Going Down Swinging, Grieve, and more. In 2022, Mulla Mulla Press published her poetry collection A Place to Land.
If you would like to enjoy a delightful meal after the event, please see link below for table reservations:
Tickets for good, not greed Humanitix dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity
