Nigel Featherstone is a queer writer for the page, stage, and music. His most recent major work is The Story of the Oars, a play with spoken songs, which had its world premiere at The Street Theatre last year. Nigel’s novel Bodies of Men (Hachette) was longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize, runner-up for the ACT Book of the Year, and shortlisted in the Queensland Literary Awards. Recently he has been shortlisted for the ACU Prize for Poetry and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Nigel is also the founder of Hell Herons, a spokenword+music collective that released its debut album, The Wreck Event, in 2024 (with Melinda Smith, Stuart Barnes, and CJ Bowerbird). In 2014 he was commissioned to write the libretto for a song cycle, The Weight of Light, which had its world premiere at The Street in 2018 (music by James Humberstone). His short works – prose and poetry – have appeared in Guardian Australia, Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Lantana, Griffith Review, Overland, Island, Oystercatcher, Rabbit, Kill Your Darlings, The Millions, Chicago Quarterly Review, and AC | DC: Journal for the Bent (US), among other outlets. Nigel lives with Gandangara, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country.

Julie McElhone is a poet, visual artist and performer whose practice interrogates the boundaries between archival material and contemporary materiality. Working with ‘unoriginal’ writing and text-based art, McElhone’s work employs a method of ‘borrowing and burrowing’ to imaginatively rewrite historical canons. Her most recent work, a continuation of her doctoral project at the University of Sydney, features an artist’s book of semi-transparent pages and 3D-printed text, inspired by the textual & spatial inquiries of Mira Schendel and Irma Blank. A finalist in Overland’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize (2018), her writing has appeared in Meanjin, Southerly, Rabbit, Barzakh and The Menteur, Paris School of Arts and Culture. Beyond studio practice, McElhone’s career is rooted in disciplinary synthesis, currently as Operations Manager for Canberra Repertory Society. This dual lens of academic research and performance management informs her exploration of cultural systems. An artist’s book created as part of her doctoral thesis was selected for a non-acquisitions commission for the prestigious Libris Awards (2025).

Also sign up on the night with our MC Lawren Wooding.  Three minutes for each open mic poet.