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 50 pieces published internationally in 2024-2025, including in Cordite, Meniscus, NZPS Anthologies, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, and in 2026 has poems in ONE ART, Thimble 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.
Gail Ingram
Gail Zing is an author of three collections of poetry, including Some Bird, selected for the Top 10 Poetry Books 2024 by The NZ Listener. Winner of both Caselberg and NZPS International Poetry Competitions, shortlisted for the 2025 Fish Poetry Prize and the Palette Publishing chapbook prize, her work appears in Poetry Aotearoa, Cordite Poetry Review, Poems for the Planet, Stone Circle Review, Landfall Tauraka, The Spinoff and others. She is a creative-writing teacher and freelance editor, and in 2025 received a residency at Robert Lord House in Dunedin. More at: https://www.theseventhletter.nz/
Erik Kennedy
Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018) all 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.
Tarn Wright
Tarn Wright (they/them) gained a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2022, winning the prize for best fiction manuscript. Prior to that they graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Hagley Writers Institute. They have published poetry and fiction in Landfall Tauraka, Turbine | Kapohau, Bonsai, takahē, Catalyst, The Butterfly Diaries, Flash Frontier, Lines in Charcoal, The Six Pack, and the National Library Blog. Tarn’s first collection of poetry, Book of Jubilations, is being published by Sudden Valley Press in winter 2026.
The Canterbury Poets’ Collective 