Poet and spoken word performer Emilie Zoey Baker is the 2010 winner of Slam!Review the poetry slam held during the Berlin International Literature Festival, in which she competed as the first-ever Australian entrant among contestants from ten countries. She also performed poetry in London, Paris and Singapore as well as being a featured guest at the 2010 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali.
In 2009 she toured North America along with fellow poets Alicia Sometimes and Sean M Whelan following an invitation to perform at Montréal’s Festival Voix d’Amériques. The tour included New York, Chicago, Ottawa, Montréal, Torronto and Vanvouver.
The winner of the 2006 Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup and multi-slam champion, Emilie featured last year at Melbourne Writers Festival, The Sydney Writers Festival, The Newcastle Young Writers Festival and at Melbourne’s famed La Mama Theatre. With collaborators Alicia Sometimes , Paul Mitchell and Sean M Whelan they co-founded Science In The Dark and put on Elemental a world premiere sell out season of art, poetry, film and theatre at The Melbourne Planetarium as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. She also toured in a live music and poetry collaboration with Sean M Whelan and the Mime Set to Castlemaine, for the Australian Poetry Festival, and to the Woodford Folk Festival. She also spoke recently at The Wheeler Centre for books Writing and Ideas In Defense of Slam Poetry and opened the 2011 National Poetry Symposium in Newcastle. Emilie has taught poetry internationally and produced two poetry anthologies, Word Up, a book and CD collaboration from schools within the City Of Melbourne and The Great Artscape by students at Templestowe Primary and Seniors as part of Artlinks through The City Of Manningham. She’s the Education Officer at Australian Poetry, creater of The Super Poets, teacher, facilitator and performer. She was the 2011 resident Artist in schools for Preston Sacred Heart Primary and is coordinater of the Super Poets 2011 extended schools residency at Rutherglen High School.
In 2010 she started OutLoud the first teen team poetry slam as part of The Melbourne Writers Festival now heading into it’s third year.
Her poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally, in journals such as Going Down Swinging, Cordite, Schriftstelle (Germany) and Short Fuse (US), Page Seventeen, Unusual Work, The Perfect Diary as well as her Chapbook She Wore the Sky On Her Shoulders published by Hit&Miss. She recently published poems inspired by the films of David Lynch in the collections We Don’t Stop Here and A Slice of Cherry Pie (The Private Press, UK & US). She’s also the author of twelve children’s books published by Book Group Australia.
