Ivy has been awarded a late summer residency, our fifth for the year and is working on a multi-volume collection, Diaspora.
Ivy says ‘Diaspora is my project of reclamation, a way to honour my culture, through poetry. Through this project, I want to braid old and new threads into a fresh understanding of this self that stands between cultures. I envision Diaspora as a multi-volume work of 19 letters, based on the Filipino alphabet, from A to Y. Innovative in scope and approach, my process relies on a deep engagement with Filipino idioms, cycling through the free verse poem, visual poem, and prose poem forms’.
With several poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean, she is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell Colony (US), and Hawthornden Castle (UK). Her poems are widely published and anthologised, including Bonsai: Best Small Stories from Aotearoa NZ (Canterbury University Press, 2018), and twice in the Best Australian Poems series.
Ivy mentors for the New Zealand Society of Authors’ Youth Mentorship Programme; is an editor for the NZ Poetry Society’s magazine, a fine line; a guest co-editor for Verity La.’s Discoursing Diaspora; and a former international editor for the first Aotearoa New Zealand edition of Atlanta Review (US). She has served on the editorial and advisory boards of Asia-Pacific Writers Network [apwn], Cordite Poetry Review, qarrtsiluni, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Mascara Literary Review, and Bent Window Books.
Ivy’s poetry collections include Mortal (USA: Red Morning Press, 2006), Disturbance (UK: Seren Books, 2013), and a limited edition, letterpress-printed booklet, The Everyday English Dictionary (London: Paekakariki Press, 2016).
Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, Ivy has lived in Scotland, Ireland and Wales before moving to Auckland, in 2014.