June Paisa Perkins  

  poet / reviewer (film / theatre), Australia.

June Perkins is a writer with an interest in social artistry, community cultural development and spirituality in the arts. Recently her arts practice has begun turning in the direction of digital storytelling, collaborations with artists, and installations of text on artists/writers walls. She has had several poems broadcast on radio, and recently one work was recorded by rap artists at a local radio station.

She is keenly writing stories for children, a novel, a play, some songs and has two non-fiction books based on her PhD being considered by publishers. Look out for the forthcoming Women of Ink and Ochre, featuring interviews with Indigenous Women Australian Writers.

June has begun to explore the possibilities of the internet, and become addicted to the art of blogging. June is also interested in the powers and challenges of community writing groups in Australia as well as worldwide.

In the past she has published (and performed) poetry, interviews with artists and writers, and Indigenous people, oral history, reviews, news and prose pieces, and discussions of drama and teaching and given workshops and papers in these areas. Her works have appeared in New Literature Review, Ulitarra, Australian Bahá´í Bulletin, Queensland Community Arts Network newsletter, Australasian Drama Studies, SideWalk & Talking Ink From Ochre.

June has created a multimedia poetry presentation - titled Soul Spinners, based on the life of Martha Root and Tahirih. This has so far been performed for two Bahá´í communities and has been very well received. June is available to perform this for Bahá´í communities able to cover her travel and accommodation costs. She is collecting her published works together into a self published volume, Life Lines Standing Tall with the Dreamers, this is illustrated by her childhood friend Paulien Bats, who is resident in Holland.

In 2003 she completed a PhD dissertation, Distilling Ink From Ochre, Empowerment of Australian Indigenous Women through Writing Practices at the University of Sydney, whilst being a mother to three children (8, 4 and 2 years). This will hopefully be published as a book in the not too distant future. Her dissertation included a number of "listening poems" written in response to the stories she heard during her research and compiled into a poetry collection for the participants in the study Singing for the Power Sisters.

She has had poetry published in SideWalk, Ulitarra, Herald of the South, the South Coast Writers Centre Anthology, and with the ACT Indigenous Writer's Group in Talking Ink From Ochre.

She has been a Bahá´í since early childhood, and started writing poetry seriously when one of her brothers received head injuries in a serious accident.

She working on her first novel and a book for children, as well as developing a number of other community and individual writing projects.

June Perkins, 2005

Requiem

Perseus persuades you
to consider me
an impossibility,
while Hades calls
for your rejection of my heart.

Buried in your
pencil coloured sea
you write your requiem mass.

A hundred syllables,
A hundred notes on
and you are gone
a legend
I leave you in
the skeleton light.

Excerpt from the poem: Dizzy
by June Perkins

..to come...