Best of Australian Poems 2022
Best of Australian Poetry is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry, across a timeframe of 1 July 2021 – 7 August 2022, the series, now in its second year, will explore how poetic responses to the contemporary moment develop with each passing year.
The book opens with an introduction by its 2022 editors, award-winning and highly respected poets and editors, Jeanine Leanne and Judith Beveridge. Both Jeanine, a Wiradjuri poet, and Judith have extensive experience as poetry teachers, academics and poetry anthologists previously.
The Best of Australian Poetry (BoAP) series is published by Australia’s national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry, and will feature two different guest editors each year, to amplify the range of voices selected. It is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and individual patrons.
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from southwest New South Wales. Her poetry, short stories, critique and essays have been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Overland and the Sydney Review of Books. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative non-fiction. Jeanine was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice (2017 & 2019).
Judith Beveridge is the author of several poetry collections, including The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987); Accidental Grace (1996), which won the Wesley Michel Wright Award; Wolf Notes (2003), which won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Award; Storm and Honey (2009); and Sun Music: New and Selected Poems (2018) which won the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Beveridge edited The Best Australian Poetry 2006 and coedited, with Judy Johnson, Martin Langford and David Musgrave Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016).
