Festival Guest Curators
Join us in welcoming four guest curators to the festival team. They will collaborate with director Rosemarie Milsom to help shape the 2021 program: Kirli Saunders is the First Nations curator….
Kirli Saunders is the First Nations curator. She is a proud Gunai Woman and an award-winning writer and teacher. Her poetry collection Kindred was shortlisted for the ABIA 2020 Book Awards and FAB Booktopia Awards. In 2020, Kirli was the NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year.
Claire Albrecht will focus on poetry. She is completing a PhD in Poetry at the University of Newcastle. Claire is also a 2020 Varuna ‘Writing Fire, Writing Drought’ fellow. She founded and runs the monthly Cuplet Poetry Night, which features local, interstate and international artists.
Laura Kebby and Amy Lovat are our emerging curators. They are the Newcastle founders of Secret Book Stuff, a social enterprise that Amy started in 2017. They collaborate with charities and non-profit organisations to get books into the hands of people in need and have organised more than 50 book-inspired events.
These short-term positions have been funded by Create NSW.