Solid Air: Spoken Word

Sara Saleh is an award-winning Arab-Australian poet and long-time campaigner for refugee rights and racial justice who has worked with human rights organisations in Australia and across the Middle East.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of over 14 books for adults and children, including the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the critically acclaimed, bestselling memoir The Hate Race, the self-illustrated picture book When We Say Black Lives Matter, and the CBCA Honour Book The Patchwork Bike (illustrated by Van T Rudd). Her poetry collections include Carrying the World, How Decent Folk Behave, It’s the Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people and Stuff I'm Not Sorry For: 99 more poems for young people.

Omar Sakr is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections, These Wild Houses (Cordite Books) and The Lost Arabs (UQP). The Lost Arabs won the 2020 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the Colin Roderick Award. Omar is a widely published essayist and editor whose work has been translated into Arabic and Spanish. Born to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants in Western Sydney, he lives there still. Son of Sin is his first novel.

Hope One is a Takatāpui Beatboxer and multi-disciplinary artist from Te Ātihaunui-a-Papārangi and Taranaki iwi of Aotearoa. Fusing together Human Beatboxing, Spoken Word, Storytelling, Drag and Movement to deliver captivating BeatRhyming experiences about identity, culture, queerness, motherhood and navigating trauma. Hope’s career started out winning an Australian Idol audition, landing a spot in the Beatbox Alliance - the very first Beatbox group in the Southern Hemisphere, touring nationally across Australia. Placing top four in the Women's division of the Beatboxing World Championships in Germany, warming up stages for major Hip Hop stars and touring the world with Internationally acclaimed theatre show Hot Brown Honey. Adding Poetry to her repertoire, she has been commissioned multiple times for Red Room Poetry, won Ruckus Slam heat in May and is making their published poet debut later this year in a lived-experience mental health poetry anthology curated by David Stavanger for MAD Poetry. Hope's writing their first theatre show in collaboration with Melanie Mununnggur called 'Do you thrust me?' set to debut later this year.

David Stavanger is a poet, producer, parent, and former psychologist living on Wodi Wodi Dharawal land. He also spends most of his week as an Artistic Director at Red Room Poetry. David is the author of The Special (UQP), awarded the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize; and Case Notes (UWAP), which won the 2021 Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry. He is the co-editor of SOLID AIR: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word (UQP, 2019) and Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health (2022). David's new collection is The Drop Off (Upswell Publishing, 2025), which explores the liminal space of shared custody and societal tropes of the ‘broken family’.

Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia. Born in Perth she has spent most of her life in Naarm (Melbourne) or on the road. She has written 3 novels Terra Nullius (2019), The Old Lie (2019), and Enclave and a non-fiction book Lies Damned Lies: A personal exploration of the the impact of colonisation (2021). Her art criticism has been published in Spectrum, Artlink and Art Collector and in exhibition catalogues for NGV, AGSA and NGA and others. Her conceptual/video work Refugium won the Incinerator Art Award in 2021 and she will feature in a number of exhibitions in 2022. She writes novels, poetry, short-fiction, drama and essay and has featured in the Saturday Paper, the Guardian, Meanjin, Australian Poetry and many others. Her short fiction and poetry has been published in multiple anthologies.

Anne-Marie Te Whiu is an Australian-born Māori belonging to the Te Rarawa iwi in Aotearoa NZ. She is a poet, editor, cultural producer and weaver. She was a 2021 Next Chapter Fellowship recipient, and her writing has been published broadly. Most recently she edited Woven (Magabala Books, 2024). This year she has been awarded the Varuna Residential Fellowship Writers and a Bundanon Artist Residency.  
Anne-Marie’s forthcoming debut poetry collection titled Mettle will be published by University of Queensland Press.

Anisa is a nationally recognised spoken word poet, play writer, educator and published author. She is the 2016 Queensland Poetry slam champion and runner up for the Australian poetry slam championships. She is the Sunshine Coast laughable comedy champion 2020 and won the crowd favourite prize at the good chat comedy club finals 2020. In 2017 she published her first book Melanin Garden and won the XYZ Innovation in Spoken Word Prize. She has performed at the Sydney Opera house, Splendour in the Grass, Queensland Poetry festival, Women of the world festival and toured the country sharing stories of love and courage. Anisa is also the co-founder of the arts collective Voices of Colour which creates spaces for migrant, refugee and first nations artists to share their work.

Angela Peita is a spoken word performer, workshop facilitator and event producer. She is a founding member and current producer of Ruckus Slam - one of Australia's largest poetry slams and is passionate about creating spaces for live art and community to thrive.
She has been published in print and online, and has performed at festivals and events all over Australia and the United States.

Pascalle Burton is a Meanjin-based experimental poet and performer with an interest in conceptual art and cultural theory. She also plays in the band The Stress of Leisure. Her collection About the Author is Dead is available through Cordite Books. 

Zenobia Frost is an arts writer and award-winning poet based in Brisbane. Her most recent poetry collection, After the Demolition (Cordite Books), won the 2020 Wesley Michel Wright Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She recently received a Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and, in 2020, edited coffee-table history book Art Starts Here: 40 Years of Metro Arts.