2020
Laura Wotton, hailing from Glen Innes Auckland is based out of Wānaka during the winter seasons as an athlete training and competing in freeski slopestyle and big air. Laura's poetry background began in the Auckland scene through Word The Front Line, an inter highschool slam competition which her team won overall in 2015. Poetry for Laura is a creative outlet to express herself, process emotions and turn hard experiences into art. She has no issue being vulnerable on the mic and more often than not, her poems leave listeners with tears in their eyes. Her writing is filled with passion, fire, humility, courage and honesty. Laura loves that poetry has the power to make others feel seen, heard and most importantly not alone in their struggles... One of the many reasons Laura continues to write and share.
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2018
Dale Grant Stephens was a poet, musician and raconteur from Queenstown. He was a fifth generation New Zealander with ancestors from Otago, who wrote and recorded prolifically. His body of work includes two CDs of country ballads set to music by former Crowded House and Split Enz keyboardist Eddie Rayner.
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2017
Paul Martin is a New Jersey born, New Zealand travelled, currently Denver based teacher and coach that uses poetry and performance as a creative outlet. His poetry revolves around themes of mental health, recovery and general societal commentary. Living in Wanaka between 2017-2018, he jumped back into the poetry scene as a way to express himself and found that when audience members connected with his words this could be a way to help others. Paul is passionate about rugby, writing, social justice and daily acts of kindness and hopes dearly to find his way back to NZ someday.
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2014
Liz Breslin is a writer, editor and performer. Her second poem collection, In bed with the feminists, (a selection of which won the 2020 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems) was published by Dead Bird Books in June 2021. This year she’s also been a virtual resident in the UK’s National Centre for Writing, looking at wireless fidelities through a peregrine webcam. In 2020, she co-created The Possibilities Project in with Ōtepoti Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature. Her first collection of poems, Alzheimer’s and a spoon, was published in 2017 and listed as one of the NZ Listener’s Top 100 Books, and was reprinted in 2021. Her poems have also been published in places including Best New Zealand Poems, Wild Honey: An anthology of NZ women poets, The Friday Poem, Stasis, Landfall, takahē and the Spinoff.
www.lizbreslin.com |
Spirit of the Slam Award
2022
Coming soon...