Poems in the Waiting Room presents our Summer 2016 poetry card, full of superb writing. We have printed 7750 poetry cards for this, our 33rd, edition of Poems in the Waiting Room(NZ). Look out for this Summer blue poetry card in your nearest medical waiting room, rest home or hospice. ENJOY.
Amanda Hunt
Amanda Hunt is a poet and environmental scientist, living in Rotorua. Her work has appeared in anthologies of the New Zealand Poetry Society (NZPS), and been highly commended in several NZPS competitions. She has also published work online and in newspapers. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, judged by internationally renowned poet Paul Muldoon, from over 250 entries.
Andre Surridge
André Surridge is a poet and playwright who lives in Hamilton. His work has been published and/or performed in Britain, the US, Canada, Croatia, Australia and NZ. His writing awards include the Shell Playwrights Award NZ 1984 and the Janice M. Bostok International Haiku Award 2012.
Charmaine Thomson
Charmaine Thomson has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University. Her first collection of poems, Licorice, was published in 2012. Her poems have appeared in the 4th Floor Literary Journal, A Fine Line, The Shot Glass Journal, The Blackmail Press and the Fib Review, Turbine and Sport.
Edna St.Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most respected American poets of the 20th century. Millay was known for her riveting readings and feminist views. She penned Renascence, one of her most well known poems, and the book The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Most notably, it was this poem where she coined the popular phrase, “My candle burns at both ends.” Millay died in 1950 on her farm in Austerlitz, New York.
Eric Dodson
Eric Dodson is a Tauranga poet, his poetry and haiku have been published in literary magazines both in New Zealand and the USA.
Freya Manfred
Freya Manfred is the author of eight books of poetry. Her two most recent are Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle, which won the 2009 Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award, and Speak, Mother, 2015, both from Red Dragonfly Press. A longtime Midwesterner who has also lived on both coasts, her poems have appeared in over 100 reviews and magazines and 45 anthologies. She’s a recipient of a Harvard/Radcliffe Fellowship and an NEA Grant, among other awards. Poet Robert Bly says, “What I like in her poems is that they are not floating around in the air or the intellect. The body takes them in. They are brave. The reader and the writer meet each other in the body.” Her first memoir, Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and an Iowa Historical Society Award. She lives north of Stillwater with her husband, screenwriter, Tom Pope, and their sons, award-winning visual artists Nicholas Bly Pope and Ethan Rowan Pope, have illustrated some of her poetry, and are the subjects of her second memoir, Raising Twins: A True Life Adventure, 2015 (Nodin Press).
Joe Mills
Joe Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.He holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. Joe has published six collections of poetry with Press 53, most recently Exit, pursued by a bear which consists of poems triggered by stage directions in Shakespeare. His book This Miraculous Turning was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. With his wife, Danielle Tarmey, he researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries, and he has written fiction, criticism, and non-fiction. More information about his work is available here .
Laura Foley
Laura Foley is the author of five poetry collections, including Joy Street, Syringa and Night Ringing. Her poem “Gratitude List” won the Common Good Books poetry contest and was read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. She won the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, judged by Marge Piercy. A palliative care volunteer in hospitals, she lives with her partner Clara Gimenez and their three big dogs among the hills of Vermon.
Lois Parker Edstrom
Lois Parker Edstrom, a retired nurse, began writing poetry ten years ago. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and have been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. Her chapbook, What Brings Us To Water won the Poetica Publishing Chapbook Award, 2010, a second collection of ekphrastic poetry, What’s To Be Done With Beauty, was published by Creative Justice Press, 2012, and a full length collection, Night Beyond Black, was published by MoonPath Press, 2016. She received two Hackney National Literary Awards, Outrider Press Grand Prize, and the Westmoreland Award, among others. Her poetry has been adapted to dance and performed by the Bellingham Repertory Dance Company. She lives in the U.S., off the coast of Washington, on Whidbey Island, with her husband and resident deer, rabbits, owls, and herons. The beauty of the island and her love of art inspire much of her work.
Margaret Mahy
Margaret Mahy (1936–2012) is New Zealand’s most celebrated children’s writer. As the author of more than 120 titles – which have since been translated into 15 different languages – Mahy’s readership is vast. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked as a librarian for over 10 years. Mahy’s books ring with humour, fantasy, adventure, science, and the supernatural, aspects that the author skilfully balances with her interest in the narrative possibilities of the ordinary world. Awarded the Order of New Zealand in 1993, she also won many global prizes for children’s writers, including the Carnegie Medal and the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award.
Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ) 