Miles Merril
This year one of the features at the Byron writers Festival was a number of top performance poets attending. I caught up with four of them, including Miles Merrill, creative director of the literary organisation ‘Word Travels’who is responsible for starting and co-ordinating the Australian Poetry Slam.
In this conversation Miles relates how age is no barrier in poetry and he is confident the popularity of Poetry and poetry slams will continue to increase.
Miles Merril
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Omar bin Musa
Omar bin Musa is a poet and rapper from Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia. He won the Australian Poetry Slam in 2008 and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam in 2009. He has released two solo hip hop records (The Massive EP and World Goes to Pieces), two self-published books (The Clocks and Parang) and a self-titled album with international hip hop group MoneyKat. His debut novel Here Come The Dogs was published through Penguin Books (Australia) in July 2014.
I asked him if it was a big jump from being a performance poet to being a novelist. He later reads us an extract from his book ‘Here come the Dogs’
Thando Sibanda
Thando is a writer, performance poet and youth development consultant based in Zimbabwe.
In this conversation from the festival I asked him about how he uses the arts to help young people to develop social skills and community awareness. He recites one of his poems at the end of this interview.
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Jesse Brand
Jesse John Brand is an award winning writer and musician and also the residing Australian Poetry Slam National Champion. To hear him tell it, it was all a bit of a surprise to him that he won that first national award but he has since gone on to win many other titles.
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Jesse’s book ‘Cranes Falling in Unison’ is illustrated with pen and ink drawings by Michael deMontfort.