Flying Island Poets

Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer and interviewer, and is the Managing Editor of Compulsive Reader, a literary review site that has been running for some 23 years. Her interview podcast, Compulsive Reader Talks, has over 150 wonderful interviews with the likes of Maria Tumarkin, Ben Okri, and John Banville, to name just a few. She has been widely ...

Tug Dumbly is the name, and sometimes Albatross, of Geoff Forrester, a poet and performer who has worked widely in live venues, schools, and radio. As a performer, he set up and ran some seminal spoken word nights in Sydney, including the legendary and drunken Bardflys. He has performed his poems and songs as a regular weekly guest on Triple ...

Kerri Shying is a poet of Chinese, Australian and Wiradjuri heritage who recently published sing out when you want me, a poetry collection that arose from receiving a Writing NSW Early Career Writer Grant in 2016. Membership & development officer Sherry Landow caught up with Kerri about the collection and other writing projects. Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications Knitting Mangrove ...

Michael Crane is an Australian poet, writer and compere of poetry events in Melbourne. Born in Brisbane in 1961, Crane moved to Melbourne at age 18. He has been an active member of Melbourne's poetry scene, performing in many open poetry readings from 1989 to 1991. In 1991, Crane organised the first Poetry Slam to be held in Australia and ...

Over 45 years Wicks has performed widely in Australia & internationally. Published/broadcast in over 400 different channels, magazines, anthologies & newspapers across 35 countries in 15 languages. Conducts workshops around Australia, has edited various projects over the decades, latest being Guide to Sydney Crime (2022) & runs Meuse Press which focuses on poetry outreach projects like poetry on buses & ...

Danny Gentile is a Newcastle-based poet, with works published in journals such as Overland, Stylus Poetry Journal, Meanjin and Southerly, and anthologies including The Best Australian Poetry 2006, The Best Australian Poems 2008, New Beginnings: An Anthology and Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets 2009. Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications The Icicle Tree ...

Geoffrey Donald Page (born 7 July 1940) is an Australian poet, translator, teacher and jazz enthusiast. He has published 22 collections of poetry, as well as prose and verse novels. Poetry and jazz are his driving interests, and he has also written a biography of the jazz musician Bernie McGann. He organises poetry readings and jazz events in Canberra. Page ...

Clark Gormley is a poet and singer-songwriter based in Newcastle. He has been heavily involved in organising and promoting local poetry readings for over 20 years. He has been published in several anthologies including Visions from the Valley, A Slow Combusting Hymn and Brew: 30 Years of Poetry at the Pub Newcastle. He has written and performed three nerd-themed one-man ...

Susan Fealy is a Melbourne-based poet, reviewer and clinical psychologist.  Her poems have been published in Australian journals and anthologies including Best Australian Poems 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2017. Others appear in the United States, India and Sweden. Among awards for her poetry are the NSW Society of Women Writers National Poetry Prize and the Henry Kendall Poetry Award. Her first collection, Flute of Milk (UWAP) won the 2017 ...

Christopher (Kit) Kelen (客遠文) is a well-known Australian poet, scholar and visual artist, and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he taught Creative Writing and Literature for many years. Kit Kelen’s poetry has been published and broadcast widely since the seventies, and he has won a number of prestigious awards over the years, including an ABA/ABC ...

Gillian’s first poetry collection is My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001). She has poems published in various anthologies including Poetry For The Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures (2021, Littoria Press), What we Carry: Poetry on Childbearing (2021, Recent Works Press), A Slow Combusting Hymn (ASM & Cerberus Press, ...

Steve Armstrong lives in Newcastle, New South Wales, and writes poetry when he's not working as a social worker/therapist. Described as a poet of "landscape, desire, memory, love, lust and loss..." (Mark Tredinnick), he won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize in 2015, the Local Award of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014 and 2019. He's been shortlisted for the Ron ...

Ross Donlon is a poet, born in Sydney, who now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria. He is widely published in Australia & also in Ireland. He was awarded the Varuna Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship in 2010 and has won two international poetry competitions, The Wenlock Poetry Festival Competition (under the auspices of the Arvon Foundation) & the Melbourne Poets' Union International ...

Harold Legaspi is a poet writing in Darug land. His first book, Letters in Language, was the runner-up in the inaugural Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry, was published 2021 in the Flying Islands Pocket Books of Poetry series with Cerberus Press and Association of Stories in Macau. Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications Letters in Language ...

Robert Edmonds is a poet, psychologist and clown doctor whose work has appeared in many publications. In 2016 he was longlisted for The University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’sInternational Poetry Prize. In 2020 he won third prize in the $25,000 Newcastle Poetry Prize. His first poetry collection Gravity Doesn’t Always Work was published by Flying Island Books in 2021 Links: www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A35083 ...

Far and Wild is Irina Frolova's first collection of poetry. It speaks to the experience of immigration and a search for belonging. It draws on fairy-tales and explores archetypes through cultural and feminist lenses.  Irina Frolova was born in Moscow in 1981, in the former Soviet Union. She moved to Australia in 2003, and now lives on the Awabakal land ...

KA Rees writes poetry and short fiction. Her work has been included by Australian Poetry Anthology, Australian Poetry Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Kill Your Darlings, Margaret River Press, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, Spineless Wonders, and Yalobusha Review among others. Links: www.instagram.com/kateamber01/ Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications Come the Bones Her debut poetry collection ...

Chris Mansell studied Economics at the University of Sydney – because she’d read Das Kapital as a teenager and thought economics was the way to understand what is going on. She spent the first ten years of her life on the central coast of NSW, and then she moved to Niugini (Papua New Guinea). At 14, she decided that she ...

Myron Lysenko began writing haiku and senryu in the late 1990's. He is the Victorian Representative for the Australian Haiku Society. He has published five books of poetry and one of haiku/senryu. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world. Myron has run almost 50 public and private ginko since 2008. A ginko is a haiku ...