In Volume 5 of the Heroines Anthology women poets rewrite or reimagine women in myth, fairy tale, folklore, legend, or history.

Come along and meet Ninshubur, Kwannon and Giubiana, Havvah, Rhiannon and Mnemosyne, dryads and selkies, muses, poets, manasa and space explorers, and many more.

The launch features poetry readings from
Jennifer Harrison
Kathryn Reese
Denise O'Hagan
Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya

Dominique Richards
& Heroines Anthology editor, Sarah Nicholson

BOOK YOUR TICKET here

Jennifer Harrison has written eight books of poetry, most recently ‘Anywhy’ (Black Pepper 2018). A new collection ‘Sideshow History’ is forthcoming in 2024. She is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry and received the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for sustained contribution to Australian poetry. Recent work has appeared in ‘Australian Book Review’ 2022, ‘Best of Australian Poems’ 2022, ‘Rabbit’ 2022, ‘Australian Poetry Journal’ 2023, ‘The Hyacinth Review’ 2023 (USA), ‘Unusual Work’ 2023 and ‘The Fourth River’ 2023 (USA). Jennifer won the 2023 Troubadour International Poetry Prize (UK).

Kathryn Reese is a poet and an occasional writer of flash fiction living on Peramangk land in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia. Her writing embraces themes of queer love, identity, nature and place. Her work can be found in the “anti-lit mag” JAKE, the UK speculative zine Voidspace and eco-poetic destinations such as Paperbark and Kelp Journal. Her flash fiction The Principal and the Sea, was published by Glassworks and received a Best of the Net nomination.

Denise O’Hagan is an editor and poet, born in Rome and based in Sydney. She has a background in commercial book publishing, and has worked for Routledge, Heinemann and Collins and consulted for the State Library of NSW. She set up her own imprint, Black Quill Press, in 2015, to publish her late mother’s historical novel Jerome & His Women (2015), shortlisted for the inaugural Institute of Professional Editors’ Rosanne Fitzgibbon Editorial Award (the ‘Rosie’). Her other publications include Messages from the Embers
(2020), Mini Style Guide (2019), Chinese Whispers: In Search of Ivy (2018) and A Roman Death (2017). Poetry editor (Australia/NZ) for Irish literary journal The Blue Nib until 2020, her own poetry has been widely published and awarded in competitions in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, France, the UK, Hong Kong and the States. Her poetry collection Anamnesis (Recent Work Press 2022) was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award (USA) and the Eyelands Book Award (Greece) and shortlisted in the Rubery Book Award (UK).

Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya is a writer and an artist with a strong natural science background. She was born in Crimea (Ukrainian Republic of USSR) studied physics and philology, and earned a PhD in Russian experimental poetry. Tatiana is an author of a great number of publications in Russian including award-winning collections of short stories and essays. Her poetry and short stories in English appeared in London Grip; POEM; Rochford Street Review; Can I tell you a secret; Not So Quiet; Skywriters; Across the Russian Wor(l)d; Bridges; Transitions; East West Literary Forum; Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, and other editions. She participated in more than twenty art exhibitions in Russia, Europe, USA and Australia. Tatiana is also a researcher and an organiser of cultural projects, including three Australian Festivals of Russian Traditional and Experimental Literature (2006-2010); Mathematics and Arts seminar; GolosA Festival of Combinatorial Poetry (2014). Tatiana is an editor of Articulation literary journal (in Russian and English) and Board member of Moscow PEN.

Dominique Richards has performed poetry at the Harold Park Hotel, written punchlines for Karl Kruszelnicki and features for The Sydney City Express. Now —via remote iron-age homesteading and child-rearing, bush regen work and writing Bush and Habitat Management Plans, and a first-class honours BA in creative writing — she lives at the very edge of chaos, a flood town on Bundjalung country, and has returned to her first love, poetry, for its power to say (and hear) intangible things. Between open-mic poetry performances, she is writing Memoir of a "Dirty Feral Hippy Type". An excerpt, Edith Falls, appears in Coastlines 6: an anthology of creative writing from Southern Cross University.

Sarah Nicholson is the creative director of The Heroines Festival and editor of the Heroines Anthology, established in 2018. She is the Director of the South Coast Writers Centre, founding Director for the South Coast Writers Readers and Writers Festival, and Manager of the True Story Festival. She has a PhD in literature and feminist philosophy of religion and has previously worked as an academic in the field of creative arts, religion, philosophy, and literature. She has been an awardee of the Ian Potter Cultural Trust for Literature, recipient of a Writer’s and Translator’s Centre of Rhodes fellowship and an Emerging Writer in Residence for the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre.