rs, and the growing middle-browisation of Australian arts and letters helped ensure that Penguin would not publish the already completed Volume Two. With The Lovemakers Book One winning the NSW Premier's Prize for Poetry (Kenneth Slessor Award), the NSW Premier's Prize Book of the Year and the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Australian Poetry, Penguin pulped remaining stocks. In February 2004, The Lovemakers Book Two was published by ABC Books. Though the reviews were again excellent, any 'promotional' campaign was non-existent. Later that year it co-won The Foundation for Australian Literary Studies’ Colin Roderick Award and H T Priestly Medal. The book has since been pulped. In early 2008 The Australian Popular Songbook was published by Giramondo Publishing, winning that year’s Grace Leven Award. Later that year Shearsman Books of Exeter, England published The Lovemakers in a single volume. 2012 will see his next volume of poetry, again through Giramondo, Prepare the Cabin for Landing, featuring his large scale satire The Vanity of Australian Wishes. Since 2011 Alan Wearne has been the publisher of Grand Parade Poets. He teaches poetry at the University of Wollongong, lives part of the year in Fremantle, and considers himself a Melbourne poet living in exile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Wearne

RAE DESMOND JONES
has had many identities. He has an impeccable instinct for getting into trouble and emerging from chaos relatively unscathed. His literary career began when he produced a thoroughly disreputable magazine called Your Friendly Fascist with a collaborator in crime, John Edwards. To the dismay of some now respectable poets and academics, Rochford Street review is now publishing the Selected Poetry of Your Friendly Fascist edited by Jones. Jones was born in the mining town of Broken Hill in the far West of New South Wales and, although many of his poems and stories are concerned with urban experience, he has always felt that desert landscapes are central to his language and perception. He became mayor of Ashfield from 2004 to 2006. He has said that for him "poetry and politics are mutually contradictory, and he finds consolation from each in the arms of the other." He has resisted the temptations of piety and respectability despite a successful municipal career. His most recent publications include The Dead, by Polar Bear Press, and Decline & Fall, by ASM Macao. His New and Collected Poems will be published in the not too distant future by Grand Parade Poets. He continues to drive Times Winged Chariot through the red lights along Parramatta Road.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rae_Desmond_Jones


OPEN MIC
To read your work in the open mic reading, just turn up on the night and put your name on the list. 2mins each so we can fit everyone in.

Plus the Wine and Tapas bar will be servin' up delicious things. See you there.