Please join us on Wednesday July 9th at 7pm for The Octagon Poetry Collective's monthly reading, with featured readers Kerrin P Sharpe and Diane Brown, with Jasmine OM Taylor as MC. We will run our usual open mic, so please bring one poem if you wish to read, and see Jasmine on the night to sign up.
Attendance is FREE, but if you have the means please support our co-hosts by purchasing refreshments during the evening.
We are a hate-free zone and decry any bigotry, hate speech, transphobia, homophobia, or racism - bring only your creativity and community spirit.
Kerrin P Sharpe has published five collections of poetry (all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, NZ) with the latest Hoof, published October 2023. She has also had poems published in a wide range of journals both in NZ and overseas including Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet Press), Blackbox Manifold, Poetry (USA), berlin lit (Germany), PN Review and Stand (UK).
She has appeared in Best New Zealand Poems six times, Best of Best New Zealand Poems and The Best of Sport 2005-2019.
She received the Michael King Writers residencies In 2021 and 2025 (forthcoming).
Diane Brown is a novelist, memoirist, and poet. Her publications include two collections of poetry – Before The Divorce We Go To Disneyland (1997) – winner of the NZSA Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana Book Awards 1997 – and Learning to Lie Together (2004); two novels, If The Tongue Fits (1999) and Eight Stages of Grace (2002) – a verse novel which was a finalist in the Montana Book Awards 2003; a travel memoir, Liars and Lovers (2004) and a prose/poetic work, Here Comes Another Vital Moment (2006) and an extended poetic memoir, Taking My Mother To The Opera, Otago University Press (2015).
Her latest work is a poetic narrative, Every Now and then I Have Another Child, Otago University Press, 2020.
Diane has held the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and was an inaugural fellow at the Michael King Writer’s Studio. She won the Janet Frame Memorial Award in 2012 and the Beatson Fellowship in 2013.
In 2013 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to writing and education.
Your Collective committee:
Jackson
Mac MacDonald
Jasmine Taylor
JA Thea
Lee Thomson
Nicola Thorstensen
Sophia Wilson
Also check out other Arts events in Dunedin, Literary Art events in Dunedin.
