POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY

Sara M Saleh, Kate Fagan and Bilal Hafda in conversation with Jazz Money.

Presented by the Blue Mountains Writers Festival.

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury,” wrote Audre Lorde in 1977. “It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” 

Inherently political yet deeply personal, Sara M Saleh’s The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat interrogates and represents the complexity of Arab-Australian Muslim women’s identities as they negotiate a world full of music and family, grit and grief, love and loss.   

With Song in the Grass, local prize-winning singer, songwriter and poet Kate Fagan delivers her most personal collection to date, an almanac of significant changes; in particular, new lives begun in the Blue Mountains during a transfiguring time of parenthood, against a backdrop of climate uncertainty.  

Spoken-word artist Bilal Hafda is currently editing his debut poetry collection, and brings an incredible depth of experience nurturing artists as host and artistic director of the Bankstown Poetry Slam. Trained as a high school English teacher, he also runs creative writing workshops in-person and online all across Australia.

These three poets are led in conversation by queer First Nations poet Jazz Money, whose latest collection, mark the dawn, is a celebration of community and gathering, while negotiating the legacies of the intersecting histories we inherit.