Join us to hear the poetry of Willo Drummond (Blue Mountains, NSW), Kate Maxwell (ACT) and our vibrant open mic!

Come along from 6:30pm to sign up to share your poetry in the open mic (up to 3 minutes). Event starts 7pm.

About the feature poets:

Willo Drummond lives and writes on Dharug and Gundungurra land. Her debut collection Moon Wrasse (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023), was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, commended in the Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry and selected as one of 6 Australian poetry titles to feature in the annual Aesop Queer Library. Willo has been the recipient of a Career Development Grant for poetry from the Australia Council for the Arts, shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award, the ACU Prize for Poetry, the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award, runner-up in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Liquid Amber Poetry Prize and the Grieve Writing Awards. In 2023-24 she co-edited, with poet Stuart Barnes, ‘Queering Ecopoet(h)ics’, a queer themed issue of Plumwood Mountain, an Australian and International Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics.

Kate Maxwell is a poet and short story writer who has recently moved to Canberra. She’s published widely in journals such as Cordite Poetry Review, StylusLit, Rochford Street Review, Meniscus, Skylight 47, The Galway Review, and Books Ireland. Kate’s poetry and fiction has been shortlisted in the UC Canberra Health Poetry Prize, the ACU Poetry Competition 2021 and 2023, the Liquid Amber Press Poetry Prize, the Booranga Literary Prize, and The Furphy Literary Awards 2022 and 2023 among others. Kate has published two anthologies of poetry, Never Good at Maths (Interactive Publications, 2021) and Down the Rabbit Hole (Ginninderra, 2023).