Closing Night: BANQUET

Tigest Girma is an Ethiopian writer based in Melbourne, Australia. After graduating with a Bachelor of Education, she splits her time between writing and teaching. Passionate about exploring East African characters and myths, her work weaves Black stories with the dark and fantastical. In her free time, she can be found rewatching her comfort shows where the villain gets the girl. She invites you to visit her at tigestgirma.com or tiktok.com/tigestgirma. Immortal Dark is her debut novel.

Lara Chamas is a Lebanese artist, based in Naarm (Melbourne), fleeing from civil war, her parents migrated to Australia, where she was born. Her practice investigates topics of postcolonial and migrant narratives within the context of her cultural identity. Using narrative and experience documentation, storytelling, transgenerational trauma and memory and tacit knowledge; her research intends to explore links and meeting points between narrative theory, cultural practice, current political and societal tensions, and the body as a political vessel.

mohamed chamas spatializes inner realms, inspirited by the ‘dijital djinni’, a conduit for expression in digital media arts. Defying and responding to the military-entertainment complex, mohamed reenchants cyberspace by drawing on their relation to personal lineage and wider contexts of magickal and divinatory practices in ancient Islamicate regions. This dis/entangles as image, sound, poetry, virtual reality (VR), installation, performance and hybrid-corrupt forms. mohamed has exhibited at Testing Grounds, Seventh Gallery, Trocadero Art Space, Incinerator Gallery and MARS Gallery, with their literary work appearing in Running Dog, Emerging Writers Festival, Co- Magazine, The Lifted Brow, Liminal Magazine and Cordite Poetry Review.

Thabani Tshuma is a multi-award-winning Zimbabwean writer and performance poet. His work can be found in publications such as Dichotomi magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, CUBBY ART, and ABC ArtWorks’ SLAMMED segment. Thabani is co-curator of Thin Red Lines and his debut collection, ‘The Gospel of Unmade Creation’, released in 2023 through Recent Work Press.

Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh is a writer, producer and arts worker living and creating on unceded Wurundjeri land. Ruby is currently the Artistic Director and co-CEO of Emerging Writers’ Festival and is a co-founder of the Latinx arts collective, Yo Soy.

More artists are coming to this event soon…