Poetry Celebration
Friday 16 August, 6:30 - 8:00pm
Te Whare Tāpere Iti, Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, Waikato University
Free Event, refreshments served.
In 2022, Chris was named New Zealand’s 13th Poet Laureate. His term has been extended to the end of August 2025. Join Chris Tse as he reads from his work, launches Tracey Slaughter’s new poetry collection and calls on our invited poets Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor, Ethan Christensen, Shivani Agrawal and Liam Hinton to share their work.
This event is sponsored by
The University of Waikato and THWUP, and supported by Poppies Hamilton with books for sale and signing.
Parking is available via Gate 2b, Knighton Road, Hamilton, with the Academy a two minute walk around the campus lake. At this time of day car parking on campus is free and no ticket is required.
Poet Laureate
Chris Tse is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, HE’S SO MASC, and Super Model Minority, which was a finalist for the 2023 Lamda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and longlisted for the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. Chris is the editor of The Spinoff’s Friday Poem and Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2023.
Poet
Tracey Slaughter is the author of Devil’s Trumpet (stories, 2021), Conventional Weapons (poems, 2019), Deleted Scenes for Lovers (stories, 2016), The Longest
Drink in Town (novella, 2015), and Her Body Rises (poems and short stories, 2005). Her novella If There Is No Shelter was published in the UK by Ad Hoc in 2020. She has received numerous awards, including the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize, 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize, the 2020 Fish Short Story Prize, the 2014 Bridport Prize,
and BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. She won the 2015 Landfall Essay Competition, and was the recipient of the 2010 Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary. She teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato, and edits the
journals Mayhem and Poetry NZ.