Vagabond Poetry Launch: Bennett, Isemonger, Williamson and Powell

Please join us for the Sydney launch of four new poetry collections from Vagabond Press: icaros by Tamryn Bennett, Greatest Hit by Holly Isemonger, Time Machines by Caroline Williamson and Gentle Creatures by Stephanie Powell. Entry is FREE. Drinks and tapas at the bar. Copies of the collections will be available for purchase on the night.

About the poets:

Tamryn Bennett

Tamryn Bennett is a poet, artist and Artistic Director of Red Room Poetry. Her book phosphene is published by Rabbit Poet Series. A second collection, icaros, was published in 2023 with Vagabond Press. She is the editor of Líneas en tierra / Lines in land a bilingual collection of Mexican poetry. As Artistic Director of Red Room Poetry, Tamryn has developed numerous national and international projects spanning Poetry Month, Poem Forest, New Shoots and Extinction Elegies that actively engage communities in creation, conservation, and tangible climate action.

Holly Isemonger

Holly Isemonger is a poet, critic and editor from Gerringong, NSW. She was the joint winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cordite, Overland and Westerly and she is the author of the chapbooks Hip Shifts (If A Leaf Falls Press) and Deluxe Paperweight (Stale Objects dePress). She can be found at @Hisemonger on Twitter.

Caroline Williamson

Caroline Williamson is a poet and editor. She was born in London, and worked there and in Beijing as a teacher, before turning her hand to editing: academic books, museum publications, and a campaigning anti-nuclear magazine. She moved to Melbourne with her Australian partner, where she has worked at Lonely Planet, Museum Victoria and Melbourne University Publishing. Her poems have been published in journals including Overland, Meanjin, Heat, Rabbit and Cordite, in a number of Newcastle Prize anthologies, and in Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (ed. Bonnie Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson). Her essay  ‘Working Methods: Painting, Poetry and the difficulty of Barbara Guest’, based on her masters minor thesis, was published in Jacket magazine #36. Her PhD in creative writing (Monash 2016) examined some of the ways that poets have attempted to deal with climate change in their work, and included a verse narrative dealing with the lives of her coal-mining ancestors in Wales, in the context of what we now know about the damage done by burning fossil fuels. She won the 2014 A.D. Hope prize for the best postgraduate essay presented at the conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, for ‘Beyond Generation Green: Jill Jones and the Ecopoetic Process’.

Stephanie Powell

Stephanie Powell writes and takes photos. Her collection Bone was published by Halas Press in 2021. She is the recipient of the Melbourne Poets Union Poetry Prize, 2022. Now Melbourne based, she lived for several years in London, with stints in Canada and Kenya. Her poetry has been published in highly regarded UK and Australian journals including Ambit Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, The Moth, Bad Lilies, Wild Court, The Rialto and Ink Sweat and Tears. One of her poems will also be published in the forthcoming ‘Resilience’ anthology from Mascara Literary Review (via Ultimo Press).  She has been longlisted for the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year competition (2021), the inaugural AUB Poetry Prize (2021), the Leeds Poetry Prize (2022) and the Lucent Dreaming Poetry Prize, 2022. Her writing was featured as part of Message in the bottle (2021), a cross-disciplinary exhibition in response to Covid-19 lockdowns at the Old Operating Theatre in London.

About the MC:

Louise Carter’s poetry has appeared in Meanjin, Best Australian Poems, Westerly, Cordite and other publications. Her poem ‘Hot Clouds’ was Highly Commended in the 2018 Judith Wright Poetry Prize and in 2020 her poem ‘History of Sadness’ was Highly Commended in the Blake Poetry Prize. She lives on Gadigal land and is a member of the Writing & Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. Her first collection Golden Repair is forthcoming with Giramondo Publishing in 2023.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.