Super Poets — Workshop Facilitators
Workshop facilitators and educators at the APC.
Invite our Super Poets to your school!
Our Super Poets can come and conduct a range of interactive and engaging workshops for students of all ages in your school or community group.
Budding poets will explore language in a whole new way using games, multi media, performance and innovative exercises with various outcomes tailored to suit your school.
All the facilitators are professional poets and experienced educators with WWCC. They specialise in different aspects of teaching and communicating poetry from science to slam, from haiku to high art to Villanelles about villains, they got it covered.
Emilie Zoey Baker
Emilie Zoey Baker is a published award winning poet and slam champion, she has performed poetry all around the world and is a state coordinator for the Australian Poetry Slam.
Poet and spoken word performer Emilie Zoey Baker toured North America in 2009 Along with fellow poets Alicia Sometimes and Sean M Whelan following an invitation to perform at Montréal’s Festival Voix d’Amériques. The tour included New York, Chicago, Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver. The winner of the Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup and multi-Slam champion, Emilie has featured at many writers’ festivals and events. Including the Sydney and Melbourne Writers Festivals, Woodford Folk Fest, The Big Day Out and Night Words at the Sydney Opera House. She is co-coordinator of Liner Notes, a legendary Melbourne spoken word night dedicated to interpreting a classic album now in it’s 4th year. Along with her fellow collaborators, Emilie was part of the world premiere sell out season of Elemental, poetry at the planetarium as part of the 2009 International Arts Festival.
She is the Education Officer at The Australian Poetry Centre and is the Victorian coordinator for the Australian Poetry Slam as well as being the current spoken word editor for the online literary journal Cordite. In September 2010 Emilie will be traveling to Germany as the first ever Australian to be invited to perform in SlamReview! An international slam conference and competition as part of the Berlin International Literature festival.
Andy Jackson
Andy Jackson is the Library Co-ordinator for the Australian Poetry Centre, and manages the “Omnibus” mobile poetry library. He uses his own experience and his knowledge of the range of Australian poetry to put on workshops that are adventurous, challenging, inclusive and encouraging. Students will write poems using the raw material of their own everyday lives and feelings- and will surprise themselves with what they can do with poetry. Andy was born with Marfan Syndrome, a genetic condition that caused curvature of the spine in his early teens. He is well-equipped to help students explore issues of identity, the body, relationships and meaning, without even realising they are.
Andy has self-published two collections of poetry, and his third (”Among the regulars”) was released in 2010.
Ezra Bix
In the last two years Ezra has won the Victorian State Final of the Australian Poetry Slam and came third and second in the national final at the Sydney Opera House. He won the final of the Age, Melbourne Writers’ Festival Poetry Idol. His first book of poetry, “Dancing in the Lifeboat” was launched at the Australian Poetry Centre. It looks at some of his favourite subjects: the environment, the fruit-loopy kookiness of consumerism and love.
He has been featured at the Melbourne Writers Festival, The Salt on the Tongue – Goolwa Poetry Festival in South Australia, The Wheeler Centre and on the ABC TV series, Bush Slam.
He examines some of the rules of rhyme and rhythm and shows how it can also be fine to break those rules. Being a performance poet, he sees the advantages of demonstrating rather than telling students what is great about poetry. Ezra always enjoys encouraging students to actively participate in workshops, believing that with the right approach, you can get them writing good poetry within minutes.
Lisa Gorton
Lisa Gorton’s poetry collection, Press Release, won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Doctorate in English Literature at Oxford University. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. An essayist and reviewer, she is also the author of a children’s novel, Cloudland.
Lisa Gorton has run poetry and creative writing workshops for primary and secondary students in Melbourne, regional Victoria and New South Wales. She has also run a workshop for teachers at the 2009 Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE) conference and been invited to speak at the 2011 National English Teachers conference. She is working with a school teacher to develop content for the Australian Poetry Centre’s forthcoming student poetry website, Poetopia.
In her secondary school workshops, Lisa emphasises how poetry relates to the contemporary world. She showcases new Australian poetry and prompts students to draw on a range of sources, from graffiti to space travel, in writing their own poems. She’s keen to make students aware of all the choices they have in writing a poem. To that end, she offers a range of examples and suggestions, from free verse to pantoums, dramatic monologues and collage poetry. In her primary school workshops, Lisa emphasises language play and drama, using call and response patterns and imaginative scenarios.
Sean Whelan
The Art of Spoken Word. Sean M Whelan teaches you the techniques of lifting your poems and stories from the page to the stage and into the public arena. Through demonstration and examples of both Australian and overseas performance poets and slam champions, Whelan will show you the many techniques involved that will better connect your work to a live audience. This is a workshop for ANYBODY that wishes to perform their poems or prose to an audience, not just performance poets. Subjects include: preparing for a reading, why you should never apologise, microphone technique, scripting, timing of your set, breathing techniques, battling nervousness, enunciation, considering your audience, running order, projection, pacing, rehearsing, performing with music, memorising versus recital, home recording versus studio and most importantly, how to enjoy a performance. The workshop will also provide students with tips on finding venues in their own area to perform their own work at. Or even on starting their own live reading event.
Sean M Whelan has been performing his work to live audiences for over ten years. He has toured the world performing live in North America and Asia. He runs a monthly event in Melbourne called Babble and he works extensively with musical act, The Interim Lovers.
Michelle Dabrowski
Michelle Dabrowski is a Canadian Spoken Word Artist, Event Organizer and Arts Educator whose works manifest on both the page and stage. Michelle is the founder of Montreal based Throw Poetry Collective, an acclaimed and very active group of spoken word and interdisciplinary artists in Montreal. Her encouraging attitude toward young artists inspired members of the collective to call her “Throw Mama.” Based in Melbourne since early 2009 she has performed and led workshops across Canada, the UK and now Australia, recently featuring in the Emerging Writers Festival and the International Arts Festival. Michelle is the recipient of the Arts Victoria, Artist in Schools Grant for 2010 working with Donburn Primary School in Doncaster on text-based installation Street Poetry surrounding themes of identity.
Terry Jaensche
Terry Jaensch is an Australian poet/actor and monologist. His first book, Buoy was published in 2001 (FIP) and shortliste for the Anne Elder award by the Fellowship of Australian Writers. He has worked as Writer-in-Community, Poetry Editor (Cordite) Artist-in-Residence, Dramaturge, Artistic Director of the 2005 Emerging Writers’ Festival, poetry teacher and in a variety of arts/community and local government programming positions. In 2004 he wrote and recorded 15 monologues based on his childhood in a Ballarat orphanage for “Life Matters” ABC Radio – since reworked and performed for theatre as “Orphan’s Own Project”. He was awarded an Asialink residency in Singapore where he worked collaboratively with poet Cyril Wong. He has won awards including the Melbourne Poet’s Union International Poetry Prize, the Victorian Writers’ Centre Poetry Slam and was on the winning team of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival Poetry Slam. He has a background in acting, having studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio and Stella Adler conservatory in New York. In his workshops, Terry seeks to help students locate their own creative impulses when it comes to the writing of poetry. With an emphasis on the personal, identity and the lived experience students come to understand the value of their own lives as subject matter for poetry and are introduced to a number of forms and poetic devices that will enable them to poetically communicate their particular view and/or experience of the world. Terry also introduces students to ways of reading/performing poetry by applying basic acting techniques to texts.
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