No open mic.

Welcome to the next in Geoff Page’s long-running series of monthly poetry readings, featuring Jennifer Mackenzie and Mark O’Connor.

Jennifer Mackenzie lives in Naarm/Melbourne. The Wallace Line: A Poem is the third volume, following Borobudur and Navigable Ink, in a series focused on Indonesia. The Wallace Line: A Poem was recently launched in Melbourne and at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, and has been translated into Indonesian by Farid Ibrahim, and is coming out this year with Tanahinde Press in Makassar. She has appeared at a number of conferences and festivals across Asia, including the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters in Trivandrum, the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Mandalay, and the Makassar and Borobudur Festivals. She has been invited to take part in the Ajanta Ellora collaborative residency in India later this year. 

Mark O’Connor OAM was born in Melbourne in 1945 and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He lives in Canberra, and is married to Janet Eagleton/O’Connor.  He has published 15 books of verse, and won many prizes and awards. His poetry shows a special interest in the natural world. He was the Australian National University’s H C Coombs Fellow in 1999, and thereafter a Visiting Scholar in its  Department of Archaeology and Natural History. He was Australia’s “Olympic poet” for the Sydney 2000 Games, with a fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts to “report in verse on the Games”. He has translated three plays by Shakespeare into contemporary English verse, for which he was awarded a doctorate in Shakespearian studies in 2016. He is also the editor of Oxford University Press’s much re-printed Two Centuries of Australian Poetry. His websites are http://www.australianpoet.com/about.html  and  http://shakespeare-in-modern-english.blogspot.com.au