Hazel Smith

Hazel Smith is a poet, performer, new media artist and academic. She has published extensively in national and international literary magazines including The Age Monthly Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Brisbane Review, Cordite, Crayon (US),  Cyphers (UK) , Figs (UK), First Offense (UK), Heat, How2 (US), Jacket, Mascara Literary Review, Meanjin, Milk (US) Molly Bloom (UK), Otoliths, Outlet (US), Overland, Pages (UK), Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Salzburg,Pores (UK), Reality Studios (UK),  Seizure, Shampoo, Shearsman (UK), Slope, Southerly, Southern Review, Strange Mathematics (UK), Stilts, Stride (UK), Stylus Lit, Sugar Mule (US), Tears in the Fence (UK), Text, Thylazine  Tinfish (US), W/Edge.  Her poetry has been included in many anthologies such as An Educated Desire (UK), Ashbery Mode (US), Australian Mosaic, Floating Capital: New Poets from London (UK), Homo Sonorus (Russia), The Material Poem, The Other Room Anthologies 5 and 7 (UK), Shuffle, Women, Poetry and Migration, (US). 

Hazel has published four volumes of poetry Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-1990, Sydney, Butterfly Books, 1991, Keys Round Her Tongue: short prose, poetry and performance texts, Soma Publications, Sydney, 2000, The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii, 2008, with accompanying CD Rom, and Word Migrants, Giramondo, Sydney, 2016. In 2020 a small selection of poems was also published by SOd Press.  Hazel has published two CDs of poetry and performance work, Poet Without Language, Rufus Records, 1994 and Nuraghic Echoes, Rufus Records,1996 (the title track of Poet without Languagewas nominated by the ABC for the international Prix Italia prize). 

Hazel has published numerous collaborative multimedia works, including motions, with Will Luers and Roger Dean, selected in 2016 for the Electronic Literature Organisation Collection 3. She is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and intermedia arts group, and has performed, broadcast and presented her work extensively nationally and internationally, including several ABC commissions.  She has been co-recipient of numerous Australia Council grants for austraLYSIS and in 2012 was the recipient of an Australia Council Digital and New Media Writing grant. In 2017, her multimedia collaboration with Will Luers and Roger Dean, novelling, was shortlisted for the Turn on Literature Prize, an initiative of the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. In 2018 novelling was awarded First Prize in the US-based Electronic Literature Organisation’s Robert Coover Award. In 2020 Hazel collaborated on a major exhibition, Heimlich Unheimlich, with artist Sieglinde Karl-Spence, at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Sydney.  A video which formed part of the exhibition was selected for the virtual (un)continuity exhibition at the Electronic Literature Organisation Conference/Festival in Orlando, USA, 2020. 

From 2007-2017 Hazel was a Research Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University where she is now an Emeritus Professor. She is the author of several academic and pedagogical books including Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000, The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, 2005 and most recently The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: intermedia, voice, technology, cross-cultural exchange, Routledge, 2016. With Roger Dean she co-authored Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts since 1945, Routledge, 1997 and co-edited Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2009. She is a co-editor of the creative arts journal of online sound, text and image, soundRite, based at Western Sydney University. Hazel previously pursued a career as a professional violinist. Her website is at http://www.australysis.com/