Join us for a fun and relaxed soiree of spoken word poetry at The Women’s Club. Warmly celebrate your fellow festival attendees as they perform poems created as a part of the festival. It will be an evening of bravery, creativity and community. Sounding Out Loud will feature performance poet Paris Rosemont, who will take the audience on an intimate journey through the themes of her second poetry collection Barefoot Poetess—from the disillusionment of fractured relationships, complexities of culture and identity, the ridiculousness of the current zeitgeist, through to —at the very heart of things, love. Sounding Out Loud will be hosted by WestWords Creative Producer and author, Ally Burnham.
Paris Rosemont is an award-winning Asian-Australian poet. Her poetry has found eclectic homes from international literary journals and anthologies, through to quirky underground zines. Her niche is theatrical performance poetry. She has appeared at the Sydney Fringe Festival, world premiere of Slam Messiah 2022, Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2023, and Short+Sweet Festival Illawarra 2023 where she was awarded Best Script. Her debut collection, Banana Girl, was shortlisted for the Dame Mary Gilmore Award 2024, and the Society of Women Writers NSW Poetry Book Award 2024. Her second poetry collection, Barefoot Poetess, published by WestWords Books, reclaims the word “Poetess”, and a woman's fierce allegiance to her body, sexuality, her selfhood.
Alexandria (Ally) Burnham is an AWGIE (Australian Writers Guild) award-winning screenwriter, novelist and writer of comics. She is best known for her feature film Unsound (Apple, 2020), which was nominated for best original feature at the 2020 AWGIE awards. A romantic-drama, the film won best Australian feature at the 2020 Melbourne Queer Film Festival and best fiction feature film at the 2020 ATOM Awards. Ally is the lead writer for Metropius (2021), a multi-media story world told across animation, comic books and board games produced by 18 Degrees. Her screenplay won Most Outstanding Animation at the 2022 AWGIE Awards. The first and second issues of her comic book, Forgotten Rose, are out now. Her debut novel, Swallow, is slated for release November 2025.
