Willo Drummond
Willo Drummond is a Blue Mountains-based poet and a lecturer in creative writing. Her critically acclaimed debut poetry collection Moon Wrasse was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, commended in the Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book and selected as one of six Australian poetry titles to feature in the 2024 Aesop Queer Library.
Willo has been the recipient of a Career Development Grant for poetry from the Australia Council for the Arts, shortlisted for multiple single poem prizes, including the Val Vallis Award and the ACU Prize for Poetry, and her work has been anthologised in Best of Australian Poems, and elsewhere.
Reviewing Moon Wrasse, the judges of the Kenneth Slessor Prize noted a ‘voice... unique in Australian poetry, questing, hesitant, humble, and open, attuned to the frequencies almost inaudible, to the ‘bird-note, gently caught / at the very edge of things.’
In 2024 Willo co-edited, with poet Stuart Barnes, ‘Queering Ecopoet(h)ics’, a queer-themed issue of Plumwood Mountain Journal.