But really, isn’t nurturing the penniless avant-garde something we should all embrace? If we sincerely believe in the great life of the imagination, the radiant promise of its daily emergence in literature, music, art, and film, and in deep reflection and complex thought – all those inalienable horizons to being truly human – then we should also step-up and protect the imagination from the many equally great forces that humanity casts against it daily.

Berndt Sellheim is a poet, novelist and occasional academic. He has taught creative writing and poetics at UTS, and lectured in philosophy at Macquarie University, where he completed a doctorate in phenomenology in 2008. His academic research includes a year at the Husserl Archive and Paris4 Sorbonne. For six years Berndt curated The Loft Readings, a Sydney-based poetry series funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Opposed to ‘graceful asymmetry’ are those who misread ‘informality’ as a mess of disorder, indifference and vulgarity. Form in poetry has always been a moral or ethical problem, a political gesture.

Marissa McDowell, a Wiradjuri woman born in Cowra NSW, grew up in Canberra where she began writing poetry at sixteen. In her mid-twenties she shared a poem called 'Caged' as a father’s day gift, and started writing seriously again after joining the 'Us Mob' writing group in Canberra.

Marty Hiatt is a Melbournite. Before realising he was a poet he erroneously wrote a novel. It ends badly. He also translates and occasionally writes criticism. He is the author of the chapbooks Rook’s Lair on a Lever (2012), portfolio of nothing file of cream (2013), and festivalize this (2014), which he put out himself with Bulky News Press.

Natalie Harkin is a Narungga woman from South Australia. She has written poetry for many years and her current PhD research is an archival-poetic response to her family’s Aboriginal records, informed by blood-memory and haunting. She is a member of her local Aboriginal writers group and the First Nations Australia Writers Network, and was recently invited to conduct a poetics masterclass at the 2014 International Writers Festival, Ottawa.

Robbie Coburn is a poet and critic. He was born in June 1994 in Melbourne and lives in the rural district of Woodstock, Victoria. His poetry and criticism have been published in various Australian journals, and he has published two chapbooks, Human Batteries (Picaro Press, 2012) and Before Bone and Viscera (Rochford Street Press, 2014) and a longer collection Rain Season (Picaro Press, 2013). His current projects include a novella and a new volume of poetry.

Caitlin Maling is a Western Australian poet whose first collection Conversations I’ve Never Had will be published by Fremantle Press in February 2015. Her work can be found, or is forthcoming, in Best Australian Poems, Australian Book Review, Westerly, Green Mountains Review, Threepenny, Australian Poetry and Meanjin, among others.

The winning entry is Jessica Hart’s ‘Land Mountain’. Jessica is to be commended for two very strong poems, with ‘Nouveau’ also being highly rated by the judges. Both her poems were striking in their sophistication and elegant use of language.

Now in its seventh year, the Overland Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets is one of Australia’s richest poetry awards and the only major competition for poets in the early moments of their creative calling.

Peter Clynes wrote his first poem when he was eight years old; his grandmother told him she loved it so he took that as a sign of good things to come. He started writing again more seriously later in high school.

Mathew Abbott is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Ballarat. His first book of poems – wild inaudible - was published by Australian Poetry last year. He blogs at beetleinabox.tumblr.com, tweets as @wild_inaudible, and plays in Canberra punk band Life and Limb.

Throughout the summer, while reading for the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, and as a terrific heatwave bled fire and brimstone across the land, the sentence ‘Sometimes it’s just about an honest, well-crafted poem’ leapt over and over through my thoughts like a cool dolphin springing from waves in an apparition of a distant inland sea.

Zenobia Frost is a Brisbane-based writer and critic with a PhD in burning the candle at both ends. Since 2009, she has released two chapbooks and toured both interstate and overseas. She travelled with the 2012 Queensland Poetry Festival Regional Roadshow, before whipping a full-length manuscript into shape at Varuna, the writers’ house.

Banjo James has only very recently, and loosely, taken up the mantle of ‘emerging writer’ (this is his first publication).

Molly Murn is completing a Masters in Creative Writing at Flinders University, South Australia, where she is also a part-time teacher of English and Creative Writing. As part of her thesis she has written a novella, The Heart of the Grass Tree, set in Kangaroo Island, which focuses on the lives of the sealers who first settled the island with their stolen Aboriginal ‘wives’ in the early 1800s.

Aden Rolfe is a writer and editor whose work includes poetry and poetics, performance writing and criticism. His poems have been published in Best Australian Poems 2011, Overland, Best Australian Poetry 2009 and Cordite, and he’s had sound collages and radioplays broadcast on ABC Radio National.

Stephen Nichols is a Melbourne-based playwright and poet. In 2006 he had a seminal moment and decided he wanted be professional writer. Since then he has had a dozen or so plays produced and has written lots of poetry and short stories.

Fiona Hile’s poems have been published in the Age, Overland, Shearsman, the Sun-Herald, Rabbit, Steamer and Cordite. Her chapbook, The Family Idiot, was published by Vagabond Press in 2012. Her features, book reviews, and interviews have been published in the Age, Southerly, Art & Australia, Art World, and The Monthly.

Ella O’Keefe lives in Melbourne and is working on a PhD At Deakin University on possibilities of the late modern poetic image using the work of Barbara Guest and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. She is a former director of the ‘Critical Animals’ research symposium.

Astrid Lorange is a poet, teacher, book-indexer, researcher and occasional home-brewer from Sydney. She is currently finishing a doctoral thesis on Gertrude Stein, experimental poetics and twentieth-century philosophies of science.

Alana Kelsall grew up on a farm in Victoria. She enjoys travelling, languages and spoken word. She is living in the UK at the moment with her husband and younger son, working on a novel about her life in Japan and completing her first solo collection of poetry. In 2010/11 she was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Competition, commended in the Rosemary Dobson Prize and shortlisted for the Welsh Poetry competition.

Rebecca Kylie Law is an Australian poet. She holds a Masters degree in Poetry from the University of Melbourne, for which she was awarded second-class honours, a postgraduate diploma in English Literature (Shakespearean Poetry, UOM), a graduate diploma in Creative Writing (UOM) and a bachelor degree in Fine Art (RMIT).

I was once an emerging poet. Judging the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets has reminded me of what that meant, how it felt to be sparkling with eager hope while stumbling around in the dark, somewhat fearful of the Poetry Furies – their testing glare and rejection slips, their unattainable approbation.

Introducing 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize runner-up: Sam Langer.

Introducing 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize runner-up: Patrick Jones.

The winner of the 2011 Overland Judith Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets is Joel Ephraims for his poem ‘Rock Candy’. The two runners-up are Sam Langer and Patrick Jones.

A Shrine To Lata Mangeshkar Puncher and Wattman, 2007 (Shortlisted for both the 2009 NSW Premiers Prize and Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize) Water Roars, Illusions Burn Vagabond Press, 2002 Territorial AnT Studios, 1996 Green, Poems 1971-78 Sea Cruise Books, 1978 It is with great sadness that we commemorate the death of Kerry Leves, poet, reviewer, […]

What is the use of poetry? One of its most crucial and historically valued functions has been the revitalisation of language, the renovation, at times even the resuscitation, of the imagination’s linguistic engagement with the social and material cosmos.