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.

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/.

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.

Joanna Preston

Joanna Preston (she/her) is a widely published Tasmanaut poet, editor and freelance creative writing tutor. She is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, both published by Otago University Press. Most recently tumble (OUP 2021) won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She re-joined the CPC committee in 2019.

Janet Wainscott

Janet Wainscott (she/her) joined the CPC committee in August 2022. Over recent years she has enjoyed the CPC Spring Reading seasons so much that she thought it was about time she contributed by joining the committee. Janet writes poetry and essays. Her work has appeared in takahē, Poetry NZ Yearbooks, Landfall, and Catalyst.