BIOGRAPHY – JEREMY ROBERTS
Jeremy Roberts is a resident of Napier, New Zealand, where he lives with his wife and young daughter. He MC’s at Napier Live Poets, contributes to Hawke’s Bay Live Poets, and helps to organise National Poetry Day events. He has appeared at poetry events in many locations, including being an MC at Auckland’s Poetry Live, and currently interviews poets on Radio Hawkes Bay.
He has made neon lights, children’s puzzles, and has been a Primary school teacher and a visual artist.
In his late teens he discovered Ferlinghetti and the Beats, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, and Sylvia Plath, while studying at the University of Auckland. The earliest live poetry performances he saw were by Kiwi poets Kendrick Smithyman and Gary McCormick, and the first Kiwi poetry collection he owned was by Sam Hunt.
Jeremy’s work has been published in a wide range of journals – including NZ Listener, Landfall, Takahē, JAAM, Poetry NZ, and Phantom Billstickers. He is also a poetry book reviewer. His first poetry collection was ‘Idiot Dawn’ – consisting of poems written in the 1980s.
He may have been the first poet in New Zealand to publicly share poems through a moving-message machine, at the beginning of the nineties – on Karangahape Road and Ponsonby Road in Auckland.
Jeremy has performed and recorded poems with musicians in NZ, Texas, Saigon, and Jakarta and many recordings and videos can be found on the Internet. His collection – ‘Cards on the Table’ was published by IP Australia, in 2015, about which NZ Poet Laureate C. K. Stead said – “I enjoy it all and find a lot to admire.”
He won the Earl of Seacliffe Poetry Prize in 2019.
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