Bernadette Hall is a well-known, widely published, award-winning poet, an editor, a reviewer and also a performer of her work (for example at the 2010 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival) who lives in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. In 2005 she spent time in Antarctica on an Artist in Antarctica Fellowship. Her ninth book of poetry, The Lustre Jug (Victoria University Press, 2009), was a runner-up in the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Awards for poetry. The Lustre Jug arose from six months spent in Ireland on the Rathcoola Writing Fellowship in 2007. For ten years she was poetry editor of TakahÄ“ magazine. She is a founding staff member of the Hagley Writers’ Institute in Christchurch. In 2011 she held a teaching fellowship at the IIML, Victoria University, Wellington. While there she curated the twelve sessions of the weekly Writers on Mondays readings at Te Papa. She was instrumental in getting the American Creek/Muscogee poet and academic Joy Harjo to visit as a teacher and a performer in the university and in the city. She has four poems in the recently published Sport 40 and three poems in Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems (Godwit, 2012) edited by Paula Green. Two of her short stories were published in earlier editions of Sport—in 2010 and in 2011. Another story, ‘Treasure’, was read on National Radio in 2011.

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