Professor Selina Tusitala Marsh
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(ONZM, FRSNZ)
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Inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate,
New Zealand Poet Laureate
Publications
MY BOOKS
How does a first-gen NZ-born Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish, French poet find her voice in Aotearoa New Zealand?
Winner of NZ Book Awards, Jesse McKay Best First Book.
How did I go from being teased at school as a 'mophead' to becoming the New Zealand Poet Laureate and the owner of a wonderously moppy talking staff, my tokotoko?
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​Multi-NZ Books Award Winner, including the – 2020 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year – New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults
How do I keep and break the Queen's rules in my poem performed for her at Westminster Abbey?
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Shortlisted: NZ Children and Young Adult Book Awards
‘What do you do if nothing is right – not at home, at school, anywhere?’
‘What if people don’t like me?’
‘What if your own ideas stink?’
‘How do I hug my dad?’
Finalist – 2024 Elsie Locke Award for Non-fiction – New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults
Built around the abyss, the tightrope, and the trick that we all have to perform to walk across it, Pasifika poetry warrior Selina Tusitala Marsh brings to life in Tightrope her ongoing dialogue with memory, life and death to find out whether ‘stories’ really can ‘cure the incurable’.
Longlisted – Poetry Award – 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
New poems by Selina Tusitala Marsh, ‘the shadow-boxing woman’: ‘Sparring myself as I go / Shadowing myself as I go’.
