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Anna JacksonThursday 22 August 9.00pm Glottis poets read at The Temple |
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Anna Jackson was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1967 and is once again living there with her partner Simon Edmonds and her children Johnny and Elvira. She is attached to the English Department at the University of Auckland. The family moved back and forth between Auckland and Oxford for seven years while Anna completed her D Phil ‘A Poetics of the Diary’ at Oxford University (in fact spending a large part of her time having babies). ‘A Poetics of the Diary’ studies the diaries and diarian writing of a number of writers including Sylvia Plath, John Cheever, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. In 2001 they lived in Hamilton, New Zealand, while Anna was the 2001 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Waikato. Anna has lectured at the University of Otago (NZ), the University of Auckland (NZ) and at Oxford in the UK – on film studies, Victorian literature, Renaissance drama, twentieth-century literature, drama on stage and screen, modern poetry, academic writing skills and medicine and literature. Anna’s was one of several poets first published in book form in AUP New Poets 1 (AUP, 1999). Her second book and first solo collection, The Long Road to Teatime, was published by AUP (April 2000). Her second solo collection The Pastoral Kitchen (AUP, 2001), completed with the assistance of a Louis Johnson Award for 2000, was a finalist in the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Anna has attracted critical notice for her short fiction, particularly her story in The Picnic Virgin (VUP, 1999). She was highly commended in the 1999 Landfall essay competition. In the visual arts she also writes in print – screenprinting, etching and aquatint. Anna used to be involved in theatre, acting and directing, but says she’s ‘not doing that any more’. Anna is essentially a Pilgerist politically – she sees the world dominated by multinational corporations and an economic system destructive to most people and to most people’s values. She and her partner share the care of Johnny and Elvira, their arrangements changing every year or even two or three times a year. It’s a bit of a deal, Anna says. Elvira is talking to the drain again: The drain mothers my daughter, ‘Grammar, mother’, and the drain takes swirls it away with a trillion people Why do my hydrangeas turn yellow Because it all comes up again.
from The Pastoral Kitchen. Auckland UP, 2001.
© Anna Jackson |
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