Poetry Salon: All I Have is a Voice

Anna Jacobson is an award-winning writer, artist, and researcher from Meanjin (Brisbane). She has written four illustrated books. All Rage Blaze Light (forthcoming September 2025 with Upswell) was shortlisted in the 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award. Her memoir How to Knit a Human (NewSouth, 2024) was shortlisted in the Queensland Book of the Year category in the Queensland Literary Awards. Anna's poetry collection Anxious in a Sweet Store (Upswell, 2023) was the winner of an Australian Jewish Book Award, and Amnesia Findings (UQP, 2019) was winner of the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Her chapbook is The Last Postman (Vagabond Press, deciBel series 3, 2018). She was the recipient of a Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Anna was a finalist in the Marie Ellis Prize for Drawing. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing and was awarded a QUT Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. www.annajacobson.com.au

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.  

Joshua Ip is a Singaporean poet, editor and literary organiser. He has published six-ish poetry collections, edited eleven anthologies, and co-founded Sing Lit Station, an over-active literary charity. His latest book, translations to the tanglish (Math Paper Press, 2021) gathers contemporary and anachronistic translations of classical Tang/Song Dynasty poetry.

Kent MacCarter is a poet and publisher based in Castlemaine, Victoria. His publishing career began at University of Chicago Press in 2000; since then, he has worked with educational publishers and, for the past 12 years been the managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review and for 8 years publisher of Cordite Books. His writing has been published widely and includes four poetry collections. Kent has been an active participant in writing and publishing communities for decades.

Shivram Gopinath is a writer and spoken word performer from Chennai, and calls Singapore home. A twice-winning National Singapore Poetry Slam champion, he has performed at Singapore Writers Festival, Borobudur Writers and Cultural Festival, Jaipur Literary Festival, among others. His work often contends with notions of identity, community and absurdity, as a way of exploring cross-cultural experiences. He is the author of the upcoming Dey (Ethos Books, 2024).

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 critic. Her debut collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems and the Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and she is the recipient of a Queensland Writers Fellowship, the Mick Dark Fellowship for Environmental Writing and the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Griffith University.