Events
Zoom Poetry Reading
Susan Bradley Smith and Stephanie Green and ‘Open Mic’ with emerging poets
Thursday 17 SEPTEMBER 2026, 7.30-9.00pm AEST
Come to this Zoom poetry event to hear Susan Bradley Smith and Stephanie Green – two fantastic poets with amazing new collections.
And in the Open Mic bracket we’ll hear from poets who were ’emerging poets’ in prize- winning, highly commended or Emerging Poets categories in our previous Prizes. It will be great to find out what they have been doing and writing.
- Kim Kenyon
- Hannah McCann
- Becky Houston
- Glen Hunting
- Luisa Mitchell
- Belinda Calderone
- Bridget Webster
- Libby Angel
- Nikki Viveca
- Lesh Karan
Susan Bradley Smith
Susan Bradley Smith is an Australian poet and historian. Born in Bega, and raised in Bundjalung country in northern NSW, she has worked as journalist, teacher, and professor in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Perth, and Rome, and now lives in Naarm/Melbourne. With seven collections of poetry, opera libretti, memoir, and history, her books include the writing and wellbeing memoir Friday Forever: Memoirs of Madness (Routledge/Taylor & Francis), the poetry collection Gladland (Recent Work Press), and the cultural history A Splendid Adventure: Australian Suffrage Theatre on the World Stage (Peter Lang). Her dream is to be a marine biologist specialising in rock pool life.
Book your ticket below
Free general admission, and supporter and patron tickets available
The Thing I Came For by Susan Bradley Smith
The Thing I Came For is a fictional memoir-in-verse which takes us from wild girlhood to untranquil 21st century womanhood, motherhood and beyond. In 80s Sydney, London and Berlin beneath the wall, Bradley Smith’s prose poems unfold a raw saga of one woman’s often chaotic hunt for freedom, finally laid bare for a beloved daughter.
Sahara Rain by Stephanie Green
A massive storm on the Moroccan edge of the Sahara Desert inspires a poetic meditation on the rippling effects of changing environments. In Sahara Rain the images of ‘weathering’ also extend to survival in war and impact on interpersonal relationships, taking readers through experiences of shock and loss to possibilities of joy and connection.
Stephanie Green
Stephanie Green is an Australian poet, essayist, biographer, and short story writer, widely published in leading Australian and international journals. Her books include a volume of prose poems, Breathing in Stormy Seasons (Recent Work Press, 2019) and a selection of short stories, Too Much too Soon (Pandanus 2006). Her poetry collection, Seams of Repair (Calanthe Press, 2023), has been praised for its lyrical precision and its meditative explorations of memory, history, and belonging. In addition to her creative work, Stephanie has led a distinguished academic career. She is currently an Adjunct Senior Lecturer with Griffith University, contributing to the fields of creative writing, literature, and cultural studies.
Zoom Poetry Reading
Lyn McCredden and B.R. Dionysius reading from their new collections, and Open Mic
Thursday 22 OCT 2026, 7.30-9.00pm AEDT
Join in this special Zoom poetry event to hear both great poets read – a must for all of us listening, reading and thinking about the insights that poetry can bring.
And Open Mic poets to hear of course. If you would like an Open Mic spot – 3 mins in the Zoom light – email us at info@liquidamberpress.com.au
Released by Lyn McCredden
McCredden’s work shows us why poetry matters. Released offers plenitude in the face of unbearable loss, infinite care for the least of these, piercing diagnoses in an age of apathy and the repainting of the world in complex gleaming hues. These poems utterly undo us, yet they also act to bind our deepest wounds. Lachlan Brown
Lyn McCredden
Lyn McCredden has written and taught poetry at a number of Australian universities. She has been published in Overland, Meanjin, Eureka Street, Southerly, Antipodes, The Catholic Worker and Westerly. Her first published volume of poetry was Wanting Only (Ginninderra Press, 2017).
She is the author of eight critical volumes, including Earthed and Sacred: the fiction of Tim Winton (SUP, 2019), Intimate Horizons: the Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature (ATF Press, 2012, with Frances Devlin Glass and Bill Ashcroft), and Luminous Moments (ATF, 2010).
She lives with her partner and dog amongst trees, kangaroos, echidnas and acres of sky in Castlemaine, Central Victoria, Australia, on Dja Dja Wurrung Country.
Book your ticket below
Free general admission, and supporter and patron tickets available
Not for Heroics by B.R. Dionysius
In a world increasingly lurching toward authoritarianism and division, B.R. Dionysius’s Not for Heroics is a poetic counterpoint to stereotypical representations of ‘heroes’ and ‘heroic’ acts that are glamourised by political agendas, in media texts, film, and popular culture as glorious acts of individual ‘human’ brilliance. This collection seeks to recover and to honour the everyday heroics of ordinary people, places, objects, animals, insects and things that just do their job in the world without any fanfare or narcissistic glorification.
B.R. Dionysius
B.R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. He is the author of five poetry collections – Fatherlands (2000, Five Islands Press), Bacchanalia (2002, Interactive Press), Bowra (2013, Whitmore Press), Weranga (2013, Walleah Press), Critical State (2022, Calanthe Press); a verse novel, Universal Andalusia (2006, SOI 3) and two chapbooks : The Negativity Bin (2010, PressPress) and The Curious Noise of History (2011, Picaro Press). He won the 1998 Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the 2002 IP Picks Best Poetry Award, the 2009 Max Harris Poetry Award, was a joint winner of the 2000 Five Islands Press New Poets Program, the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, and the 2016 Paul Sherman Community Poetry Award. He was short-listed in the 2013 and 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. He was recently awarded a 2023 Queensland Writers’ Fellowship from Arts Queensland, the State Library of Queensland and the Queensland Writers’ Centre to write The Eromanga Sea (2026, Calanthe Press). Not for Heroics (2026, Liquid Amber Press) is his eleventh book.
Zoom Poetry Reading
Poetry on Fire launch and poet readers
Thursday 26 NOVEMBER 2026, 7.30-9.30pm AEDT
Let’s celebrate! Hear the winners and poets with poems in the Longlist from the 2026 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize.
All these poems will be in the anthology Poetry on Fire, to be launched at the event by Nathan Curnow.
Let’s catch the spark! The judges of this year’s Prize say …individually and collectively the poems in this Anthology are indeed wonderfully, disruptively, compellingly ‘on fire.’
Come along to enjoy what promises to be a great launch, and performance of wonderful new poetry.
Book your ticket below
Free general admission, and supporter and patron tickets available
Nathan Curnow
Nathan Curnow is a poet, playwright, spoken word performer, and past editor of Going Down Swinging. He is a recipient of three grants from Creative Australia and his work has been awarded numerous prizes over the last twenty-five years. He has taught creative writing at Federation University and toured Europe in 2018, opening the Heidelberg Literary Days Festival in Germany. An ex-lifeguard, he lives and works on the traditional lands of the Wathaurong people in Ballarat.
His poetry titles are: No Other Life But This (Five Islands, 2006); The Ghost Poetry Project (Puncher and Wattmann, 2009); RADAR (Walleah Press, 2012); The Right Wrong Notes (Flying Islands, 2015); The Apocalypse Awards (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016), and A Hill to Die On (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).