Fremantle Poetry Month launch

16th June 2010

The food and wine is ordered, the performers are booked, the Mayor is preparing his speech notes and it’s all systems go for the launch of Fremantle Poetry Month at 6.30pm on 8 July 2010.

The evening will feature music by Xave Brown, Amber Fresh and Lil Leonie Lionheart plus poetry performances by Nandi Chinna, Kevin Gillam and Janet Jackson. It will also celebrate the launch of the 2010 Fremantle Press poetry list of Burning Bright by Caroline Caddy, The West by John Mateer and Fremantle Poets 1: New Poets by Scott-Patrick Mitchell, J.P. Quinton and Emma Rooksby.

About the performers:
Xave Brown is a contemporary singer-songwriter of subtle, complex and powerful music. An established performer in the southwest of WA, Xave regularly gigs on the local and Perth circuits as well as at major WA festivals. As a solo performer Xave has played on Triple J and supported Paul Kelly, The John Butler Trio, Carus Thompson, Nathan Gaunt and toured with Ruby’s Grace and The Kill Devil Hills. In 2009 he was a finalist in the Independent Music Awards Awards and in 2006, Xave won the WAM Regional Song of the Year for his single ‘Call of the Wild’.

Amber Fresh is a writer from Perth (via Albany and Paris). She writes poetry on a typewriter and makes music in a band called Rabbit Island. Recurrent themes include boys, the Bible and Bukowski. Her poems have been published in Westerly, Navigations, Cottonmouth Zine, MoTHER [has words…], The Ponies Zine and Metior. In 2009 she released her first book of poetry, Between You and Me, with funding from the Department of Culture and the Arts.

‘Lil Leonie Lionheart is a local musician, who performs both in her own band and with Amber Fresh.

Nandi Chinna was born in Adelaide. She spent seven years living in a yoga ashram before moving to Perth in 1990. Her poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies, and has been broadcast on RTRfm, 6PR and Radio National. Her first poetry collection Our Only Guide is Our Homesickness was published by Five Islands Press in 2007. She is currently a PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, for which she is writing poetry about wetlands and walking.

Kevin Gillam is a West Australian poet whose collections Other Gravities (2003) and Permitted to Fall (2007) are published by Sunline Press. He has had two chapbooks published by Picaro Press: shouting, drowning (2006) and closer to now (2010). In May of this year he will be a guest poet at the Wordstorm Writers Festival in Darwin.

Janet Jackson is a poet of page, screen and microphone. Since 1986 she has sculpted eclectic English in lines that liquidate the line between the loud and the literary. She seeks poems that work whether declaimed loudly or whispered in the mind. She performs with attitude, soul and sometimes guitar. Janet published her first collection, Coracle, in March 2009 and she self-publishes online at her website Proximity www.proximitypoetry.com. Janet organises Perth Poetry Club. She has been a guest at 2010 Goolwa Poetry Festival, 2009 Queensland Poetry Festival and recent WA Spring Poetry Festivals and Melbourne Overload Poetry Festivals. Her poems have appeared in print and online media including Mattoid, BLAST, Marginata, The West Australian, Malleable Jangle, The Broadkill Review (US), nthposition (UK) and Hamilton Stone Review (US). She has self-published three chapbooks, In the church of my skull (2005), Listen (2006), and In whatever voice (2007).

Caroline Caddy was born in Perth, Western Australia, and spent her childhood in the United States and Japan. She has raised two children, and published seven books of poetry, including Esperance (Fremantle Press 2007), Editing the Moon (Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1999), The Working Temple (FACP 1997) and Antarctica (FACP 1996). Caddy’s work has been broadcast on ABC Radio National and appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.

John Mateer was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published five books of poems and a prose travelogue on Indonesia with Fremantle Press. He has given readings of his work at poetry festivals in Europe, Asia, Australia and South Africa. Selections of his poems have been translated into Japanese, Indonesian, Portuguese and German. Of his work, The Japan Times has written: ‘Mateer’s manner and the complex resonances of his work reminded me a little of the prose of his compatriot, the Nobel-prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee. The poems are inquisitorial, ethically preoccupied and sometimes powerfully intense.’

Scott-Patrick Mitchell works as a journalist for OUTinPerth. His poetry and fiction has been published in numerous anthologies and he has been a guest of the National Young Writers’ Festival and the Emerging Writers’ Festival. In 2009, he won The PressPress Chapbook Award for songs for the ordinary mass and in 2010 he won the Poetry Slam in Perth. He is featured in a new anthology called Out of the Box.

J.P. Quinton was born and grew up in Perth’s ‘rich and romantic country’ near Bassendean. The Swan River and rivers in general are a preoccupation in his writing. James has had poems published in Westerly and Cottonmouth and has self-published three chapbooks.

Emma Rooksby was born in Perth but now divides her time between Canberra and Wollongong. Her poems have been published in Australian journals and newspapers including Blue Dog, Famous Reporter and Eureka Street.

The launch of Fremantle Poetry Month is free and takes place at 6.30pm on 8 July 2010 at the Fremantle Arts Centre. RSVP by 5 July to admin@fremantlepress.com.au or 08 9430 6331.

Fremantle Poetry Month is proudly sponsored by the City of Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre, the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre, the Fremantle Library, Radio Fremantle, indigo journal, Little Creatures Brewing, Out of the Asylum Writers Group, Plantagenet Wines, Roland Leach at Sunline Press, and WA Poets Inc.

For more information please contact Claire Miller, cmiller@fremantlepress.com.au