Poetry Salon: All I Have is a Voice

Amanda Chong is a lawyer, poet and playwright who explores themes of gender and power in her work. Her poetry collection, Professions, was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and her poetry is studied as part of the Cambridge International GCSE Syllabus. Her plays include the one woman show Psychobitch which sold out its extended run (Wild Rice, 2023), the musical The Feelings Farm (Esplanade Theatres, 2021) and the award-winning #WomenSupportingWomen (T:>Works, 2022) which was also staged in Cambridge, UK. 

Jarad Bruinstroop’s debut poetry collection, Reliefs, won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and is available now through UQP. He won the 2023 Val Vallis Award. His work has appeared in The Best of Australian Poems, Meanjin, Overland, and elsewhere. As the University of Queensland Fryer Library Creative Writing Fellow, he is developing a novella cycle that draws on Brisbane’s Queer history. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from QUT where he also teaches.  

Svetlana Sterlin is based in Meanjin, where she writes prose, poetry, and screenplays. A swimming coach and former swimmer, much of her recent work draws inspiration from in and around the pool (including her online publication, swim meet lit mag). Her debut poetry collection, If Movement Was a Language, was the recipient of the 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award and is forthcoming with Vagabond Press. In 2023 she was also recognised in the Richell Prize and Queensland Young Writers Award. You can find her words in Island, Westerly, Cordite, the Australian Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere.

Ella Jeffery is a poet, editor and academic. Her debut collection, Dead Bolt, won the Anne Elder Award and the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Poetry Book. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Best Australian Poems, HEAT, Meanjin and many others.