Kathy Kituai: Poet, diarist has been an assistant editor for The Institute of PNG Studies, creative editor for Muse and tanka editor for Cattails, facilitated creative writing courses in Scotland, SA, NSW, and ACT since 1990, and is published in Japan, UK, USA, Canada, India, New Zealand, PNG and Australia. She served as a host for Poetry at Manning Clark House and as vice president for FAW,, founded and facilitated Limestone Tanka Poets (10 years), was on the Lake George (Weereewa) festival board, received ARTS ACT Funding (twice), and two Canberra Critic awards. The Art of Catching Jam Before it Burns, (new and selected poetry, 1992 --- 2023) is her latest publication.
Kerrie Nelson is a Canberra poet who writes as K A Nelson. She is a former Australian Public Servant who spent most of her career working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, organisations and communities. She came to poetry early in her life and then came back to it much later, winning the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets in 2010.
In 2015 Nelson’s first pamphlet of printed poems, A Chosen Life, appeared with Cait Wait’s paintings in an exhibition and reading at The Residency in Alice Springs. Two full-length collections published by Recent Work Press followed: Inlandia (2018) and Meaty Bones (2023), both were highly commended in the ACT Writers’ Centre publishing award (now Marion). Meaty Bones also received a Canberra Critics Circle Award late last year. Geoff Page reviewed Meaty Bones for Quadrant in April this year and Kimberly Williams and ArtSound FM interviewed Nelson for their ‘Poets on the Radio’ series.
Publications of poems have appears in Best Australian Poems, Mascara Literary Journal, Rabbit Literary Journal, Not Very Quiet, Arena among others. Poems have been included in many anthologies too.
In 2021 K A Nelson graduated from the University of Canberra’s Masters by Research degree. Her exegesis explored white privilege and its legacy in Australia. The creative component, a memoir with poetry, is entitled Searching for the Glad Tomorrow, focused on lessons from her working life.
Kerrie coordinated the poetry readings at MCH for a year, inheriting that honour from Kathy Kituai and handing it on to Hazel Hall. She says it’s always a pleasure reading at MCH because it was the first place she read her work in 2013 as a novice, with her mother and daughter present.
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