THAT POETRY THING

7pm Monday 18 April (Doors open 6:30pm)
Smith’s Alternative, Canberra

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David Hallett (NSW) and Rina Kikuchi (ACT/Japan) + Open Mic

Nimbin poet David Hallett has been writing and performing poetry since the 1970s. Host of two long running spoken word events, Lismore's Live Poets and Byron Bay's Writers at the Rails, David has toured from outback schools and festivals to the Sydney Opera House to the beat cafes of New York. Twice winner of the Poetry Olympics at the Sydney Writers Festival, winner of the 2019 Reciter of the Year award plus the Woodford Story award, Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup and Byron Bay Writers Festival poetry prize David's poetry jumps from the page to the stage from the comedic to the satiric to the deadly serious. His fourth collection of poems titled Out of the Blue addresses the spin of politics, media and money, climate chaos, love, shopping and our maddening digital world.

Rina Kikuchi is a poetry translator, a professor of literature at Shiga University, Japan, and an adjunct Associate Professor of poetry in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. She is currently working on a bilingual anthology of contemporary Japanese women poets, co-translation project on Misaki Takako’s poetry and research project on Japanese women’s poetry of the Asia Pacific War. Her books of poetry translations include Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan (RWP, 2017, co-edited with Jen Crawford) and Pleasant Troubles (RWP, 2018, co-edited with Harumi Kawaguchi).