Anna Fern

Anna Fern likes bicycling along the Yarra, lolling on the Oak Lawn, mushrooming in the Dandenongs, eating Vietnamese soup at Footscray Market, and performing at Melbourne venues such as Eltham Courthouse, La Mama Poetica, the Dan O’Connell Hotel and The Make It Up Club.

In 2008 she won the ‘What the Hell Was That?’ Award at the Overload Poetry Festival.  Her work has appeared in Unusual Work, on Melbourne trains as part of Moving Galleries, and on recordings such as the Voiceprints anthology of sound poetry.

Ezra Bix

Ezra won the final of The Age, Melbourne Writers’ Festival Poetry Idol. His first book of poetry, “Dancing in the Lifeboat” was launched in 2009 at the Australian Poetry Centre. He has featured at the Melbourne Writers Festival, The Wheeler Centre and in the

ABC TV series, Bush Slam. The Melbourne City Council commissioned him to write a poem commemorating Melbourne Day and the 175th anniversary of settlement. He is also currently writing a series of poems inspired by the city.

Eleanor J Jackson

Eleanor Jackson is a poet. When she is in Australia she can get fixated with things homely and humble; she often writes about the quiet things. Eleanor is responsible for bringing together the amazing poets of the Melbourne Poetry Map, in no small part so that when she is surrounded by palm trees and betel nut, she can remember poky laneways, good coffee and the dead smoking unicorns of Hosier Lane.

Scribes and Scribblers

This is the journey for those who love their literature as full of psychedelic longing as their love affairs. Start by draining the rainbow from a smoking unicorn. Then spend an idle moment leafing the pages of an out-of-print edition at Collected Works. Stand in civic pride to close the chapter on your first love, before capping it all off under the corrupt sheen of violating paint. These are poems that aren’t afraid to leave their mark on the city.

The Long Story

This is the journey for those with the legs for poetry. First, take two stone monuments off their plinths for a well-deserved drink. Shake your fist at the Windsor Hotel developers, throw a handful of invisible confetti at a wedding and – if the building is still there – check out the shop that once turned its back to the world. Then, wrap it all up with the ephemeral monuments to the could-have-been legends of Melbourne’s rock scene. This is Melbourne’s long back story: black turtlenecks, grandeur, new money illusions – the tombs of history, glory and disappointment.