Melinda L Smith – April 1 2018

World Autism Awareness Day – April 2

Melinda has been writing poetry for publication since 1996. She writes in many different traditional forms, and in free verse, in a pithy and accessible style. Her poems are often darkly comic and frequently pack an emotional punch. She mostly tries to write poems that can speak to a person of ordinary intelligence without the help of a literature academic. Her other poetry collections include Pushing thirty, wearing seventeen and Mapless in Underland and her work has appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, both in Australia and internationally, and has been broadcast, set to music, hung on gallery walls and plastered across the back of a bus as part of ACTION buses. She performs her poetry at the Poetry at the Gods readings series, tweets as @MelindaLSmith and blogs at www.melindasmith.wordpress.com. Having grown up in Orange, NSW, Melinda currently lives in Canberra, ACT, with her partner and their two sons, the oldest of whom was diagnosed with autism at age three and a half.

Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call
Pitt Street Poetry, 2013; ISBN 9781922080226
Parsing the pastoral, poetics, Petrarch and parturition, Melinda Smith’s deft mastery of diverse poetic forms is coupled gracefully with a refined sense of humour and some sharp insights into the nexus between the quotidian and the immutable. This fourth collection of Melinda’s won the poetry section of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2014. The award citation said, “From its range of technique and tone to its depth of ideas, imagery and emotion, this collection announces the arrival of a major new poet.”

First … Then … poems from planet autism
Ginninderra Press, 2012; ISBN 9781740277341
“[A]ll the poems in this book are about life with autism”. There are poems from the point of view of carers, family members, autistic kids, autistic adults … hopefully something for everyone. Melinda’s Foreword explains her presumption to write not only of her own experiences as a mother, but ”in the voice of a person with autism when I myself am not autistic” as she has been “engaging in the time-honoured creative practice of standing in the shoes of my fellow humans in the hope that we may all start to better understand each other”.