Our Own Cafe Poet!

Trish Gearman has been chosen as a "Cafe Poet" at the Fremantle Arts Centre
Congratulations to our class member @ WAC & OOTA writer Trish Gearman (aka Gardner) who will be a Cafe Poet at the Fremantle Arts Centre in 2012. Trish will spend her time as "Poet in Residence" in the courtyard cafe for a period of six months. We wish her many hours of happy writing!
Visit Australian Poetry here..

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Calling All Tattooed Poets!

Best American Poetry is once again thrilled to spread the word to inked poets everywhere. Bill Cohen (Best American Poetry blog) would like to post an image of your tattoo on Tattoosday every day during April. Tattoos need not be literary in nature to qualify. If your ink is featured, Bill hopes to give a little history of your tattoo, some background about you and your poetry, and he'll include links to your own website, books, and poems. With your permission, he'll even post a poem. Last April, Tattoosday recorded over 30,000 hits and nearly 50,000 page views. In addition, you'd be joining the ranks of ninety poets, several of them BAP contributors, who have participated in years past. You can see who's been cool enough to join the ranks here...

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Castaways Poetry Competition

The City of Rockingham is pleased to announce that submissions are now open for the 2012 Castaways Poetry Prize, with almost $500 in prizes. Submissions are open until March 13th, 2012.

Guidelines
The body of your email must include your name, address, phone/mobile number, email address, and the title & line counts of your poems. To ensure anonymity, do not include your details on your entered poems themselves.
Do not post entries. Only entries received via email will be accepted.
Each poem must be no longer than 24 lines.
Poems must be original, unpublished, not have received an award in another competition, and not be under consideration elsewhere from the time of entry in the awards until the official announcement of the winners.
To ensure anonymity no writers names to appear on MS. Winners able to attend will be invited to read their poem at the Castaways 2012 Opening Night Awards presentation on Saturday 12 May 2012.
Employees of the City of Rockingham and their family members are ineligible to enter.
The judges’ decisions are final, and no correspondence will be entered into. Any attempt to lobby judges or City of Rockingham employees, or influence decisions, may result in disqualification.
Entries close 13 March 2012, and winners will be contacted by phone or email prior to the public announcement at the Castaways 2012 Awards night presentation.

The 1st prize winning entry will be published in the Castaways 2012 catalogue.

1st PRIZE: $250 + 2 copies of the Castaways 2012 catalogue
2 COMMENDED PRIZES: $100

For further information contact Lee Battersby, Community Development Officer (Culture & Arts) on 9528 0386 or lee.battersby@rockingham.wa.gov.au
City of Rockingham not listed yet!

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Sandfire Launch Video

Over 120 people joined poets, Flora Smith, Rose van Son, and Chris Konrad to help celebrate the launch of their poetry collection Sandfire. It was a great day with plenty of food, good wine/champagne and plenty of heat...from the sun...! Still, plenty of smiles all around. OOTA wishes our three poets who are members much success with this very attractive collection. Published by Sunline Press, books will be available in all good book stores (where we don't want them to remain!). Video produced by Out of the Asylum Writers Group. Enjoy!

Sandfire from H2 Design on Vimeo.

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Penguin (Aust) in now accepting unsolicited manuscripts

The Monthly Catch
Penguin Group (Australia) is keen and excited to read new work from Australian authors, and as such we’ve developed the Monthly Catch. For the first week of every month, we throw our doors open to unsolicited manuscripts. In this time period (the 1^st to the 7^th of every month), please send through submissions based on our GUIDELINES. Click here for further info @  Penguin

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Farewell Pocket Theatre

OOTA/Writing at the Centre extend their best wishes to Helen & Gordon of Pocket Theatre. Thank you for past fun, for supporting OOTA writers. We all loved No Insalata (written by Josephine Clarke) & the Christmas Parrot Play!

Dear Friends and Supporters of Pocket Theatre

It is with real sadness that we (Directors Helen Brett and Gordon Mac Nish) have decided to turn off the stage lights and bring down the final curtain on Pocket Theatre.

When Pocket Theatre commenced in 2004, we, plus Geoff Pearson, aimed to provide a local live theatre where new and emerging playwrights could have their plays performed before a live audience. Since that time we have had ten seasons of one act plays and assisted 13 playwrights to have one or more of their plays staged.

We feel it is time for us to move on to other pursuits both in and out of the theatre scene. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support. We have really appreciated your attendance at our shows and thank you for the feed-back you have given us over the years. We would especially like to thank the directors and actors who brought the Pocket plays to life on the stage.

Best wishes

Helen Brett and Gordon Mac Nish
Directors of Pocket Theatre

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