Carrie Rudzinski has performed her work over the past 17 years in six countries and has been featured in Bustle, HuffPost and Teen Vogue. She ranked 4th in the world at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam, won the 2019 Pussy Riot Award at Auckland Fringe Festival, and co-founded Auckland’s JAFA Poetry Slam. Her poems have been published in Landfall, The Spinoff, Stasis Journal, Catalyst and Muzzle, among others. She is the author of seven books and five spoken word albums, and from 2016–2020 she taught the only spoken word course offered at a tertiary level in Oceania at Manukau Institute of Technology. Carrie is the co-creator of three poetry theatre shows – How We Survive (2019), The Bitching Hour (2023) and Hysterical (2022) – the latter of which won Best New Aotearoa Play at the Wellington Theatre Awards and Outstanding Performance Poetry at Auckland Fringe Festival. Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan, is an artist of upu/words on the page, digital storytelling and live performance, and is dedicated to carving, elevating, and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. She is a recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016, and highlights of her work include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2018, and being a co-founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aotearoa, Rising Voices (2011–2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective. She has published two collections, Afakasi Speaks (2013) and Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press, is the writer of My Own Darling commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019), and curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020 & Kia Mau Festival 2021). Alongside Dr Lana Lopesi, she is co-director of Flying Fetu Festival, dedicated to building abundant futures for Moana artists of upu/word. Grace is currently working on her next body of work, ‘Water Memories’.
