Queer Creatives Panel : Event this Friday at Newtown Library

Emily Writes is a writer and speaker. As well as the book below (and a couple of others!) she writes anything and everything in her monthly newsletter.

Featured title: Adult supervision needed : Lessons in growing up

"Needs Adult Supervision is Emily Writes' take on growing up and feeling like a real adult. This book looks at the growing pains of kids and their parents and their attempts to navigate a world that's changing by the minute. Emily paints a vivid picture of all the feelings, fortunes, and failures that come with trying to parent when you don't always feel up for the task. From trying to convince your child's teachers on Zoom that your house isn't falling apart around you, or staging a funeral for a sea creature, to rescuing a dog that rescues you, Emily's stories will have you reflecting on what it means to grow up."
Adapted from catalogue

Joy Holley is a lifelong Wellingtonian and writer whose writing can be found in many journals and anthologies, including Starling, The Spinoff, and Sweet Mammalian.

Featured title: Dream girl

"Alice wants a heart-shaped bed. Mary, Genevieve and Angelica want to know the future. June says she wants Lena to rescue her from a rat, but really she wants Lena to make out with her. Eve wants to get Wallace alone at the strawberry farm. Olivia just wants to leave the haunted boarding school and go home. Bittersweet and intimate, comic and gothic, Dream Girl is a collection of stories about young women navigating desire in all its manifestations. In stories of romance and bad driving, ghosts and ghosting, playlists and competitive pet ownership, love never fails to leave its mark."
--Catalogue

Pip Adam is an award-winning writer and novelist who has published four novels and a short story collection. Her writing has also appeared in a plethora of journals and anthologies in Aotearoa and overseas.

Featured title: Audition

"Audition is hurtling through space towards the event horizon. Squashed immobile into its rooms are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their incarcerated former selves. Or are they constructing those selves from memory-scripts that have been implanted in them? Part science fiction, part social realism, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room, and about how we live with each other's violences, and imagines a new kind of justice."
--Catalogue

Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, composer, taonga Pūoro practitioner, performer, artist, and researcher. Amongst her writing you can find both poetry and a PhD in public health.

Featured title: The artist

"In a Southern land, where the veil of time and space has worn thin, twins with otherworldly ways are born to a stone carver and his wife. As they grow into themselves, the landscape and its histories will rise up to meet them and change their whanau forever. Cave art leaps from walls, pounamu birds sing, legends become reality, and history becomes the present in this verse novel by Ruby Solly. The Artist brings to life the histories of our great Southern iwi through the whakapapa of its characters and the rich world they and their ancestors call their turakawaewae-their place to stand, their place to sing."
--Adapted from catalogue

Shaneel Lal is an activist, writer, and journalist, the 2023 Young New Zealander of the Year, and founder of the Conversion Therapy Action Group which led the movement to ban conversion therapy in Aotearoa

Featured title: One of them

"What would you do if you were told by the people you loved the most that the way you were born was evil and wrong? For Shaneel Lal, this was their reality from the time they were five. Growing up in a tiny, traditional village in Fiji, Shaneel always knew they were different. From the time Shaneel started school, they faced condemnation from their family, and 'therapy' from conservative elders in their village trying to 'free' Shaneel from the evil spirits they thought were making them queer. After escaping Fiji and moving to New Zealand as a teenager, Shaneel gradually found the courage to come out. One day, while volunteering Shaneel encountered a church leader and experienced a lightbulb moment: they could not believe that the same practices that had scarred their childhood in Fiji were operating - and legal - in New Zealand. Determined to ensure others wouldn't have to go through what happened to them, Shaneel founded the Conversion Therapy Action Group."
--Adapted from catalogue

Sylvan Spring is a poet and musician (the book below comes with an accompanying album). Their work has also appeared in various places, including The Spinoff, Turbine Kapohau, Sweet Mammalian, and Stasis.

Featured title: Killer rack

"In their first and often euphoric first book, Sylvan Spring is constantly and irresistibly in motion. These are poems for the sad bitches, the silly billys, the divine transsexuals, the girls who were first to get piercings not in their ears, the ones who dream of dissolving into a river, the Cocteau Twins obsessives, the average bros, the immaculate twinks, the retired popstars turned chicken farmers, and fans of 2001 masterpiece Charlie's Angels."
--Overdrive