Sarah St Vincent Welch
chalk borders
Flying Islands Publishing, 2021
Sarah St Vincent Welch’s chalk borders is playful and soulful, and explores borders, frames and boundaries. chalk borders includes spare poems engaging with places from her #litchalk practice, where she chalks poems on the footpaths at art festivals in an ekphrasis of place, treating the whole environment as an artwork. These and longer poems engage with the tenuous lines drawn between art and life, the animate and inanimate, inside and outside, and present and past. chalk borders is inhabited by a love of existence and hope.
About the Author
Sarah St Vincent Welch grew up in Sydney and was a member of No Regrets women writers workshop and the Sydney Poets Union. She has a double major and honours in English Literature from the University of Sydney. In 1987 she gained a Graduate Diploma in Media at University of Canberra (UC).
She worked at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) for a decade as a Film Preservation Officer with a speciality in early cinema. She worked at UC as a casual and contractual tutor, lecturer, and convenor in creative writing units and was acknowledged with a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. She now works as a freelance writer and editor and is the founder of Kindred Trees (kindredtrees.com.au) a project that asks Canberra poets to write in response to a beloved local tree. She is one of the organisers of That Poetry Thing That is on At Smiths Every Monday. Working with writers living with a disability, and writers living with mental illness, fed into a continuing love and commitment to facilitating creative writing in her community through workshops, which she has done for thirty years.
Her latest commission is a description for signage exploring the diverse cultural stories of trees on the Ngala Trail in Haig Park, Canberra. Her short stories and poetry have been published in anthologies and literary journals. In 2021 she travelled around Australia working on a creative non-fiction We don’t have words: a meditation on suicide and place. She plans to continue her #litchalk practice, chalking poetry on footpaths at arts festivals, for as long as she can.
