Poet of the Month

David Brooks, critic, novelist, short story writer, animal rights activist as well as poet, taught Australian Literature, ran a writing program, and co-edited Southerly at the University of Sydney. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest (The Peanut Vendor) included in his new and selected poems: The Other Side of Daylight (UQP, 2024). He lives in the Blue Mountains with rescued sheep and advocates for kangaroos. The Sydney Morning Herald called his The Balcony (UQP, 2007) ‘an electrical experience’.

Damen O’Brien is a multi-award-winning poet based in Brisbane. His prizes include the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, The Moth Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and the Val Vallis Award. His poems have been published in seven countries, nominated for a Pushcart, and highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Damen’s first book of poetry is Animals With Human Voices (Recent Work Press, 2021). His new book of poetry is Walking the Boundary, available from Pitt Street Poetry.

Kate Fagan is a writer, musician, and scholar whose third collection, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. She is Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and runs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers. She also chairs the Sydney Review of Books advisory board. Her latest volume of poetry, Song in the Grass, was published by Giramondo in June 2024.

Andy Jackson is a poet, creative writing teacher, and a Patron of Writers Victoria. He was the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellow, and has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal. Andy’s latest poetry collection is Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021), which won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her books are A Kinder Sea, Seastrands, Vanishing Point, and the anthology Thirty Australian Poets (as editor). Her recent essays are ‘Plath Traps’ for the Sydney Review of Books and ‘Strange Territory: Poems as “gifts to the attentive”’ for Australian Book Review. She was an ABR Fellow in 2015 and 2019.

Dan Disney’s latest books include New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave) and accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His individual poems have won numerous prizes, including, most recently, the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Disney teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.

For me, if a poem doesn’t originate in the body, in the gut, it’s usually a plotting of the forebrain, an attempt to ‘say something’, and should be ignored.

Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, 2021).

The list is long, and takes the scenic route, from Homer to Hill, on to Plath / and Sexton, Murray, Adamson, and many I’ve forgotten. An overgrown path / with signposts lit or down, pressing on by star or map light, word of mouth / or accidental find. Influence is confluence, where shock of emotion / meets quiet thought. I follow leads, read every day, avoiding emoticons. 

Alex Skovron is the author of seven poetry collections, a prose novella, The Poet (2005), and a book of short stories, The Man who Took to His Bed (2017). His volume of new and selected poems, Towards the Equator (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His work has been translated into a number of languages, and he has co-authored book-length translations of two Czech poets: Jiří Orten and Vladimír Holan. His new collection, Letters from the Periphery, is now available. He was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and arrived in Australia aged nine. He lives in Melbourne.