Janis Freegard
Janis Freegard’s first solo collection, Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, was published by Auckland University Press in 2011. Her work has previously appeared in AUP New Poets 3 and a wide range of journals and anthologies. She also writes fiction and is a past winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. Janis was born in South Shields, England and spent part of her childhood in South Africa and Australia, before her family settled in New Zealand when she was twelve. She has an honours degree in plant ecology and lives in Wellington with an historian, a cat and various spiders.
Freegard comments: ‘A large male American alligator can grow to 360 kilos or larger; smaller alligators can reach high speeds on land over short distances (though perhaps not as high as 27 kilometres an hour); there are albino alligators in captivity, but they would be unlikely to survive in the wild because of their sensitivity to the sun; female alligators do build nests; there are alligators in the Everglades. Other assertions in the poem may be somewhat less accurate.’
Links
Janis Freegard at Auckland University Press
Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus at Auckland University Press
A list of all the animal species mentioned in Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus
