My first book is launching April 30, and this week it's going to print. The cover is finished after many versions! My amazing daughter, Rata Ingram, designed it. It's based on one of the illustrations in the book. YES! the poetry is illustrated! The pic we used for the cover is a reference to Lady Godiva, an ancestor of the protagonist. My graffiti-artist protagonist admires Godiva because she is someone who was prepared to (literally) expose herself to help people out of the

I wrote a poem in response to the attack on two Christchurch mosques on Friday 15 March 2019. It is the only way I feel capable of responding. For me as a Christchurch writer, it feels necessary on some level to take responsibility as a human-being who lives here here in a community where I have seen love, neighbourliness and strength in the hardship after the earthquakes, but also a community that this attack grew out of. I turned to Tusiata Avia's poem "I cannot write a poe