Perth Poetry Festival 2025
The Finale
Featuring our Micro-Residency Showcase
Sunday 31 August
7:30 PM – 9:30 PM
Jonesway Theatre
The closing night of the Perth Poetry Festival is more than a final set. It is a celebration of what we’ve built, what we’ve heard, and what comes next.
This year’s finale brings together six standout creatives from across the festival, alongside fresh work from our 2025 Micro-Residency recipients. Emceed by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, the evening invites reflection and emergence. From jazz-infused lyricism to performance art, poetry in movement to poetry in protest, this event closes the festival with full heart.
Featuring:
– Karen Louise (she/her) is a performance poet and minimalist songwriter who lives in the jarrah forests intersecting the unceded lands of the Wardandi, Bibbulmun and Keneang peoples in Balingup. Her work weaves womanhood with worldliness. Her performances find space, her poems breathe and her songs linger.
– Antonio Montaine is a rhythm poet, stylistically influenced by jazz and hip-hop culture. His writing draws from lived experience and social critique, shaped by his upbringing in Melbourne’s western suburbs and time in the Royal Australian Navy.
– Sari Bennett is a WA-based writer, performance poet and upcycler living on Molloy Island. A collector of moments and a seeker of the sacred within the mundane, her background in dance and physical theatre informs her embodied spoken word performances.
– Liam Blackford is a West Australian poet living on Whadjuk Noongar Country. His first two poetry collections were finalists for the international Proverse Prize and explore themes of power, constraint and possibility.
– Valentina Macias is a jazz pianist, composer and singer-songwriter active in the Perth jazz scene. Her poetry explores time and vulnerability, extending her creative practice across language, lyric and music.
– Dakota Howard is a regional journalist by day and drag artist by night, known to lip-sync on national and international stages. In 2024, they returned to their love of poetry, blending the visual and emotional power of drag with the written word.
– Tim Loveday is a multi-award winning poet, writer, educator and baby academic. His work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation, rurality and climate collapse.
Special Feature – Micro-Residency Showcase
Each year, the Festival invites three local poets to undertake one-day micro-residencies. In 2025, residencies will take place at The Wetlands Centre Cockburn, Mattie Furphy House (FAWWA), and the KSP Writers’ Centre. Poets will spend a day immersed in place and practice... writing, walking, reflecting.
And the results will be shared live at this finale! Three dazzling acts to round up the night!
Accessibility:
Jonesway Theatre is wheelchair accessible. Please get in touch with us if you have any access requirements.
This event takes place on Whadjuk Noongar Land. We pay deep respect to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the enduring sovereignty of First Nations people. This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal Land.
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