DON'T CALL US DIRTY : LOU GARCIA-DOLNIK
This poem is ambitious and yet confessionally dense. Its mixture of registers is fresh and startling, as it switches between various subjectivities and viewing positions, running its fingers along the seam between the sacred and profane.
Lou Garcia-Dolnik is a mixed-race Filipinx writer and editor working on unceded Gadigal land. Their work gravitates around the variant matrices of diasporic identity: intergenerational and personal traumas, sexual and gendered violence, gender identity as negotiated within|outside whiteness, and the impossible ambivalence of the non-white diasporic subject as patterned in language.
Their writing has been recognised by numerous international residencies and prizes, including the Banff Centre’s prestigious Writing Studio program, PRISM International's Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and Overland's Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, PRISM International, Liminal, Rabbit Poetry Journal, Scum Mag and Voiceworks. A poetry editor for Voiceworks and alumnus of the Banff Centre's Emerging Writers Intensive, they have held tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Hermes Journal and Prose Team Leader of the Sydney Arts Student Society Creative Journal, ARNA. They are a 2020 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow.