All The Best are collaborating with Curate Poetry, a brand new poetry and spoken word recurring event based in Naarm.
Curate||Poetry is where word art meets visual art: an inaugural showcase of Australia’s best poets performing their curated back catalogue. Poets are invited to write signature pieces that respond to a current exhibition with the hope of dismantling artistic boundaries, and inviting new audiences in. Be transported from slam to stanza to quotes climbing from the canvas.
Find out more by visiting Curate’s Facebook or Instagram. You can buy tickets to the inaugural event here
Tim Loveday
Tim is an award-winning poet, writer, and editor. His poetry/prose has appeared in Meanjin [Online], Overland, The Griffith Review, Cordite, Suburban Review, Mascara, and The Big Issue, among others. In 2022 he won the Dorothy Porter Poetry Award. A Neurodivergent dog parent, he is the verse editor for The Creative Hub of Extinction Rebellion and the ongoing convener for curate||poetry. He is represented by Jacinta di Mase agency; they’re shopping his verse memoir, ‘your father was a bastard’.
You can find more of Tim’s work here
Matcho Cassidy
Matcho is a multi-creative powerhouse that focuses on spoken word, movement arts, and performing arts. He’s been performing spoken word for over 7 years and runs Soul Lounge Australia with events in Adelaide and Melbourne. He helps run and organise grassroots community events and arts events with a focus on uplifting People of Colour.
You can find more of his work here
Eloise Grills
Eloise is an award-winning artist and writer living on Dja Dja Wurrung land. This piece comes from Eloise’s illustrated memoir, big beautiful female theory. It explores the socially constructed nature of confession in writing, and how the need to share trauma has affected her and her practice. Big beautiful female theory, is out now with Affirm Press. You can find more of Eloise’s work here
Hasib Hourani
Hasib is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, 2020 next chapter recipient, editor, and educator currently living on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Born stateless in Bahrain, Hasib grew up between the Kulin Nation and the Gulf, returning to so-called Australia in 2016. This piece was written in 2021 for performance in Better Off Said and adapted for publication in Cordite Poetry Review later that same year.
You can find more of Hasib’s work here
Ren Alessandra
Ren is a national award-winning spoken word artist and English teacher who merges her love of both arts into active, engaging and empowering writing workshops and performances. You can follow her work here and on instagram
Josh Cake
Josh Cake writes poetry, music, and comedy, for a variety of contexts — from Canadian spoken word to Icelandic cabaret, from US video games to Chinese university workshops, from TEDx to the ABC and the NGV — and has claimed prizes such as the Best Multilingual Performer award from Arts de Paris, the Peseroff Poetry Prize from the University of Massachusetts, and a number one ranking in the National Poetry Slam.
Josh teaches writing and performance at universities as well as one-on-one coaching, and is currently touring a spoken word album called ‘words to regret when i’m better at editing’, available for download here
All The Best credits:
Production Manager: Phoebe Adler-Ryan
Editorial Manager: Mell Chun
Episode Mix and Compile: Phoebe Adler-Ryan
Host: Danni Stewart
Community and Events Coordinator: Lidiya Josifova
Social Media Producer: Timothy Nguyen
Trainee: Madhuraa Prakash
Image credits: Matthias Wagner via Unsplash, Curate Logo, Eloise Grills ‘Complaining’
Music for this episode from Lobo Loco – Lovely Echoes via Free Music Archive, Sound effects from BBC Sound Archive