Paper Bark Press
Photo: Brandon McKenzie
Geraldine McKenzie
In 1997 Geraldine McKenzie came equal first in the ars poetica poetry competition. In 1998 she was short-listed for the Josephine Ulrick Prize and equal runner-up for the Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize. She was invited to be one of four participating local poets at a workshop given by Deb Westbury at Varuna Writers Centre. In 1999 she won the Robert Harris Prize and received a grant from the Australia Council for Emerging Writers.
She has published reviews in Jacket, How2, cordite and Island. Her work has been anthologized in Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (Paper Bark Press/Craftsman House) and New Music: an anthology of new Australian poetry (Five Islands Press). Her work appeared in a feature on innovative Australian women poets in the highly respected online journal for modernist women writers, How2. She was one of a number of Australian women poets invited to contribute to a forum on poetics in Meanjin.
Duty is her long awaited first collection and was published by Paper Bark Press / Craftsman House in 2001. It received the Mary Gilmore Award for the most outstanding first book of poetry 2001-2002.
She is an experienced reader and has performed at a number of poetry venues including the Sydney Poetry Festival (where she also gave a paper on the Australian-American connection), the Melbourne Poetry Festival, Varuna Writers Centre, Collected Works (in Melbourne), the Central Coast Festival and the sculpture tours run by Macquarie University.
In April 2002 she visited New York for a week and gave two readings. She also read in London and at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. In 2003 she gave a paper on Line and Space at a forum at UTS, Sydney, and a paper on poetry and music at the Conference held by the Mallarmé-Brennan Association in Paris.
Geraldine McKenzie has work accepted by the following magazines and anthologies:
The Age, Antipodes (USA), ars poetica, Boxkite, Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (Paper Bark Press/Craftsman House), Catalyst 2, Cauldron and Net (online), cordite, Elixir (USA), Famous Reporter, Hambone (USA), Hobo, Homebrew, How2 (online), Imago, Island, LX9 (USA), Jacket (online), Meanjin, New Music: an anthology of new Australian poetry (Five Islands Press), Perforations (online), Poetry New York (USA), Quid (UK), Salt, Samizdat (USA), Shearsman (UK), Slope (online), Staple (UK), Tinfish (USA), Ulitarra and Westerly.