I’m overjoyed that my poem Free Association was selected as one of the five finalists in the inaugural Mercedes Webb-Pullman Poetry Award. The award was announced on the first anniversary of Mercedes death at a celebration of Mercedes’ life and work at St Peters Village Hall, Paekakariki, New Zealand.
Press release here: https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU2408/S00094/mercedes-webb-pullman-poetry-award-announcement-of-winners.htm
On Sunday the 25th of August, I’ll be at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival to interview Keri Kitay about her new book The Long Goodbye: Lessons on humanity from the grips of Alzheimer. More details and for tickets: https://events.humanitix.com/the-sydney-jewish-writers-festival-2024
I’ll be reading poetry at the Melbourne Jewish Book Week this year with superstars Alex Skovron, Louise Helfgott, Eva Collins and moderator Sloshy Rockman. This will be a heady session for sure! Come join us if you’re in Melbourne (and come to Melbourne if you aren’t!). I’d love to see you there.
This is my first Melbourne Jewish Book Week and I’m so excited to be moderating and performing in two panels. The first is “For the Love of Bubba” with incredible authors Barbara Kamler, Ramona Koval, and Elise Esther-Hearst. We’ll be talking about all things grandmother – real, great, fictional, Booba, bubble, bubba, bubby, Bobish, Cookie – they have many names and incarnations and we’re going to engage with all of them.
Thrilled to have my longlisted poem, “Ghost City”, included in being, the 2023 anthology of longlisted, shortlisted, and prizewinning poems from The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. The prize was judged by poets Mani Radio and Tony Barnstone, and the anthology edited by Professor Jen Webb and Dr Kimberly Williams. This year’s winner was Damon O’Brien for his superb poem “Natural Causes”.
I’m delighted to have my first Esperanto publication. Actually the Esperanto was a beautiful (at least it sounds beautiful) translation by Kit Kelen of my poem “False Promises on Petals” and was published in the latest (June 2024) issue of Esperanto sub la Suda Kruco
The latest issue of Science Write Now, “Underground”, is up on the website and I’m very happy to have a poem included titled “Wet Gully Elegy”, written after Kimberly Brown‘s painting ‘Making Our Own Way’. You can go straight to the link: http://sciencewritenow.com/read/10-the-underground/wet-gully-elegy to read the poem, my science inspiration piece, and listen to me read it (to the accompaniment of Nine Inch Nails). The poem is about life, death and the forest generally, but it is also a very specific elegy for my mother, who died 10 years ago. Of course the whole issue is exquisite – with essays, fiction and poetry from many wonderful creative people. You can check it out here: http://sciencewritenow.com/
On Sunday the 9th of June, I’ll be hosting a panel of exceptional modern Jewish poets at Limmud Oz. Miriam Hechtmann, Hazel Smith, David Adès, and Marcelle Freiman will be joining me at Limmud to read poems and talk about such things as how the relationship between identity and creative practice, the impact of world events on their work, poetry as a means for engaging with the complexities of the world, diaspora, migration, and memory. Find out 
more about the session and the festival at https://www.limmudoz.org.au/program
Lake Macquarie’s annual Write Here program is on again at various venues around Lake Macquarie from the 16th to the 19th of May and includes sessions on everything from comedy writing to audio books, crime writing, and lots of different types of memoir (which is very popular at the moment). I’ll be giving a workshop on the 18th at Toronto library on Writing the Verse Memoir – that is, using the tools of poetry to create a memoir. The workshop will be hands-on and you will leave with a good idea of how to utilise the tools of poetry to enhance your own storytelling – whether that’s a straight memoir or whether you want to utilise the elements in fiction, biography, or any other genre. You’ll leave the session with plenty of material! More information and booking details here: https://library.lakemac.com.au/Events/Writing-the-verse-memoir-Magdalena-Ball
On May the 1st, I’ll be joining Kolkata academic and author Ketaki Datta for a poetry reading and Q&A in which we talk all things poetry and take questions from the audience. Time is 2pm IST which is 630pm AU EST. I’ll post a link to join remotely as soon as it becomes available. Session will also be recorded.
