Courtney Sina Meredith

New Zealand poet, playwright, fiction writer, and musician Courtney Sina Meredith is of Samoan, Mangaian, and Irish heritage. She earned a BA from the University of Auckland and is the author of the poetry collection Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick (2012) and the short story and poetry collection Tail of the Taniwha (2016). Of Brown Girls, critic John Daly-Peoples said, “She grapples with the big issues of poverty, conflict, sexism and racism, but also more immediate ones of sex, drinking and eating. All this is rolled into poems which are both serious and frivolous. She is a mixture of performance poet and romantic—a singing Ginsberg and howling Shelley.”

Meredith has held residencies with the Bleibtreu Berlin and the Sylt Foundation and has represented New Zealand at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Mexico City Poetry Festival, and the International Indonesian Poetry Festival. She is the winner of the Going West Poetry Slam and the Montana Poetry Slam. Her play Rushing Dolls (2010) won the Aotearoa Pasifika Play Competition and received an Adam NZ Best Play by a Woman Playwright award.