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.
Jor Dansaren
Jor Dansaren (she/they) is an MC, producer, poet and performance artist based in Ōtautahi. Heavily influenced by the delights of the natural world, Old Norse skaldic storytelling, and spiritual process, Jor finds wonder in life and the broad spectrum of human experience. They are a regular poetry slammer and their written work has been published in Catalyst and Fuego journals.
Lee Fraser
Lee Fraser (she/her) won the Ōtautahi slam 2023 and 2024, placing fourth nationally in 2024. She’s had 70+ poems published internationally in 2024-2026, including in Anthropocene, Cordite, Meniscus, NZPS anthologies, ONE ART, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, takahē and Thimble. 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.
Melanie McKerchar
Melanie McKerchar is a disabled, queer, Ōtautahi poet and artist who has been published in various literary journals and anthologies locally and internationally. She is an international slam champion and has performed in the NZ National Slam Finals. Her second book Which Witch Body, was released by Sudden Valley Press in 2025. Melanie joined the CPC committee in 2026.
Grant Shimmin
Grant Shimmin is a South African-born writer living in Aotearoa since 2001, who counts humanity, justice and the natural world among his favoured poetic themes. A career journalist and longtime Stuff columnist and a 2025 Best of the Net nominee, he has work published in around 35 journals around the globe, including a fine line, Tarot, Bull, Remington Review, Querencia Press, Raw Lit, North Dakota Quarterly and the NZPS anthology.
The Canterbury Poets’ Collective 