Sandra Renew
Acting Like A Girl
Recent Work Press, 2019
Sandra Renew’s new poems interrogate the choices made in living and performing gender, sexuality and desire—of struggling to be queer in an Australia of Holden utes and rotting mangoes, XXXX stubbies and Bundy rum, boudoir drawers and country roads, toad princes and wanting to be Wesley Hall. It is a book of not wanting to conform, charting the myriad pressures society places on conformity as a mode of survival. It is a brave, and sometimes funny book, filled with wry and deeply felt images and observations
2020 Winner ACT Writing & Publishing Award for Poetry
2020 Shortlisted ACT Book of the Year
About the Author
Sandra Renew has international, national and local publication of her work in journals and anthologies, as hard copy and on-line. She has a local and national reputation as a performance poet and was a featured poet at the National Folk Festival Spoken Word for three years from 2017 to 2019. Sandra also writes short form prose and micro-lit and was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 joanne burns Microlit Award. She is experimenting with using traditional forms to write about LGBTIQ presence in the world with the express aim of upsetting the order of the social order.
Sandra is a founding editor, with Moya Pacey, of Not Very Quiet an online journal for women’s poetry and co-hosts the Not Very Quiet women’s poetry nights at Smith’s Alternative. Sandra and Moya were awarded a Canberra Critics Circle Award for their influential contribution to women’s poetry in 2019.
