Photography - Christopher Phillips

Tamryn Bennett is a poet, Director of Red Room Poetry, Founder of Poem Forest and Poetry Month. Her two poetry collections are Icaros (Vagabond Press) and phosphene (Rabbit Poetry). She is also editor of A Line in the Sand (Pantera Press) and Líneas en tierra / Lines in land (Australian Poetry) — a bilingual collection of Mexican poetry.

Having grown up in a plant nursery, nature informs Tamryn’s creative practice and projects. Since 2012, she has developed national and international collaborative projects that actively engage communities in conservation, creation and systems change including New Shoots: A Garden of Poems (VIC, NSW, WA, QLD, UK), Extinction Elegies, Plant Symphony recording bio-emissions, and Poem Forest which plants a tree for every student nature poem received. Most recently, she also paved the way for Australia’s first Poetry Month.

Her poetic projects are widely exhibited in Australia and internationally. She has held residencies across Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK), El Centro de Cultura (MX), Bundanon and Wollongong Art Gallery (AU). Her poems, comics and essays have appeared in Covert PlantsAustralian Poetry, Cordite, ImageText, Philosophy, Activism, Nature amongst others.

Tamryn has a PhD in ‘comics poetry’ from the University of New South Wales. She was awarded the 2018 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship and Australia Council for the Arts Professional Development Grant.