OUR WORDS 2024

Anne-Marie Te Whiu an Australian-born Māori who belongs to the Te Rarawa iwi in Hokianga, Aotearoa NZ. She is a poet, editor and weaver. She was a 2021 Next Chapter Fellowship recipient, and her writing has been published widely nationally and internationally including Another Australia (Affirm Press) Te Awa o Kupu (Penguin), Sport, Tupuranga Journal, In*ter*is*land Collective, SBS Voices, Cordite, Rabbit Journal, Contemporary Hum, Running Dog, Ora Nui Journal, Te Whē, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Awa Wahine and Australian Poetry Journal. Most recently she edited Woven, published in partnership with Magabala and Red Room Poetry. Previously she edited Tony Birch’s Whisper Songs (University of Queensland Press), Bebe Backhouse's More Than These Bones and Solid Air: Australia & New Zealand Spoken Word (University of QLD Press) which she coedited. 1 In 2023 Anne-Marie was awarded a studio residency as part of the Clothing Store Artist Program, Carriageworks. Between 2015 – 2017 she co-directed the Queensland Poetry Festival, and she was a coproducer of the Writers Program for the Aotearoa New Zealand International Arts Festival (Wellington - February 2024). Anne-Marie’s forthcoming debut poetry collection titled Mettle will be published by University of Queensland Press.

Joy Harjo served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022. She is the author of ten books of poetry, plays, children's books, and two memoirs. She has edited three anthologies of Native poetry. She was recently honored with the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, Yale's 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. As a musician Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums. She is the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center. She lives in the Muscogee Creek Reservation in Oklahoma.

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara grandmother, poet and visual artist residing on Ngadjuri country where she lived her adoptive years. Traditional desert country and culture provided solace to write following her epic journey to re-connect with her birth and kinship families. Ali's verse novel She Is The Earth (Magabala 2023) was awarded Indigenous Writers Prize and Book Of The Year at the 2024 NSW Premiers Awards.

Natalie Harkin (Narungga) is a poet and Research Fellow with the Indigenous Studies team at Flinders University. She has a strong interest in archival justice, engaging archival-poetic methods to document community Memory Stories, Aboriginal women's domestic service labour histories, and Indigenous Living-Legacy archive innovations for our time. Her books include Dirty Words (Cordite Books), Archival-poetics (Vagabond Press), and APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA (Wakefield Press, in-press).

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of seven previous books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies, short listed for the Dublin Literary prize and the Governor General’s award for fiction. Leanne’s latest album, Theory of Ice, released by You’ve Changed Records was released in 2021 and short-listed for the Polaris Prize and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project in collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living was also short-listed for the Governor General’s award for non-fiction. Leanne is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Eugenia Flynn is Tiwi, Larrakia, Chinese Malaysian and Muslim writer and academic. Her creative practice explores narratives of truth, grief, and devastation, interwoven with explorations of race and gender. Her essays, short stories and poems have been published in IndigenousX, NITV, Peril magazine, The Lifted Brow, Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry and #MeToo: Stories From the Australian Movement. Her text work has appeared in exhibitions such as Waqt al-tagheer: Time of Change at ACE Open, Enough خلص Khalas: Contemporary Australian Muslim Artists at UNSW Galleries, and SOULfury at Bendigo Art Gallery. 

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The author of the prize-winning novels Praiseworthy, Carpentaria, and The Swan Book, Wright has published three works of non-fiction: Take Power, an oral history of the Central Land Council; Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory; and Tracker, an award-winning collective memoir of Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth. Her books have been published widely overseas, including in China, the US, the UK, Italy, France, and Poland. Wright has won a number of literary awards, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Carpentaria, as well as the James Tait Fiction Prize and the Queensland Literary Award for Praiseworthy, which was also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award—one of the world’s richest literary prizes. She is the first author to win the Stella Prize twice: for Tracker in 2018 and for Praiseworthy in 2024. She held the position of Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne and was honored with the title of Distinguished Professor at Western Sydney University. She is the inaugural winner of the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Tracey Rigney is a Wotjobaluk and Ngarrindjeri woman from Victoria. Her screenwriting credits include the 2019 short film, 'Elders', which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival before screening at multiple national and international festivals), 'The Warriors' (TV series produced by Arenamedia for ABC), as well as her short films 'Man Real', 'Abalone' and 'Endangered'. Tracey also wrote the chapter 'Rebel Art' for the Feature film 'We are still here', which opened the 2022 Sydney Film Festival. Her playwriting credits include 'Belonging' (Ilbijerri/Playbox Production Melbourne), 'How Blak R U?' (Next Wave Festival Production Melbourne) and 'Hidden' (Courthouse Youth Arts Centre Geelong 2003/4). In 2022, she wrote 2 plays for young audiences: ‘Rella' for Windmill Theatre Company and 'Someone in the Dark'

Sonya Rankine, a Narungga, Ngarrindjeri, Ngadjuri, and Wirangu woman, is a multidisciplinary artist. Established Lakun Mara in 2019, meaning 'Weaving Hand' in Ngarrindjeri, learning from master weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Her art, strongly tied to cultural preservation and revitalisation. Awarded the 2019 Our Mob Exhibition Don Dunstan Foundation Emerging Artist Prize and the 2021 SA NAIDOC Artist of the Year, Sonya's work has been showcased since 2019 across regional, metro, state, and national platforms. Notably, performed at the 2022 Adelaide Cabaret Festival and wrote songs and performed in Narungga language for the Wild Dog Exhibition 2022, awarded 2023 Ruby Award and Guuranda, Adelaide Festival 2024. Sonya's poetry reflects on her experiences and addresses social and political issues, recently published in the ‘Rock Remains’ Aboriginal Anthology launched at the Adelaide Writers Festival 2024. Sonya is an emerging playwright as the inaugural First Nation Fellowship 2024 recipient with Brink Productions.