The Committee

Marisa Cappetta

Marisa Cappetta (she/her) graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Hagley Writers’ Institute. She received a mentorship from the New Zealand Society of Authors. Marisa has been widely published in New Zealand and international journals and anthologies. Steele Roberts published her first collection How to tour the world on a flying fox in 2016, and Sudden Valley Press published her second collection, Tender Insurrections, in 2023.

Lee Fraser

Lee Fraser (she/her) won the Ōtautahi slam 2023 and 2024, placing fourth nationally in 2024. She had over 40 pieces published internationally in 2024-2025, in Meniscus, NZPS Anthology, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, and elsewhere. In 2024 she was long/shortlisted for Given Words, Micro Madness, and the Monica Taylor poetry prize. Lee joined the CPC committee in 2025.

Jenna Heller

Jenna Heller (she/her) is an American-Kiwi poet and fiction writer whose work appears in journals published in Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, the UK and US. She placed runner-up in the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2021 and won National Flash Fiction Day in 2020. She has been a member of the CPC committee since 2021.

Gail Ingram

Gail Ingram (Ngāti Pākehā, she/her/they) writes from the Port Hills of Ōtautahi and is author of Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019). Her poetry and short stories have appeared widely across Aotearoa and internationally. Editor for a fine line and Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction, find more at https://www.theseventhletter.nz/. She joined the CPC committee in 2022.

Erik Kennedy

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He joined the CPC committee in 2017, and is currently the secretary.