Sandra Renew

Sandra Renew has international, national and local publication of her work in journals and anthologies, as hard copy and on-line. She has a local and national reputation as a performance poet and was a featured poet at the National Folk Festival Spoken Word for three years from 2017 to 2019.

Sandra also writes short form prose and micro-lit and was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 joanne burns Microlit Award.

She is experimenting with using traditional forms to write about LGBTIQ presence in the world with the express aim of upsetting the order of the social order.

It’s the sugar, Sugar is her fourth collection after Acting Like a Girl (Recent Work Press 2019), The Orlando Files (Ginninderra Press 2018) and Who Sleeps at Night (Ginninderra Press 2017).
One Last Border: Poetry for refugees was co-written as a fundraising project with Hazel Hall and Moya Pacey (Ginninderra Press 2015)

Sandra is a founding editor, with Moya Pacey, of Not Very Quiet an online journal for women’s poetry and co-hosts the Not Very Quiet women’s poetry nights at Smith’s Alternative. Sandra and Moya were awarded a Canberra Critics Circle Award for their influential contribution to women’s poetry in 2019.

Author's books

Apostles of Anarchy

$19.95

It’s  the 1970s and 1980s, and Sandra Renew, a young lesbian activist in Far North Queensland, is involved in some of the most politically charged moments in Australian history. From Pine Gap to civil rights marches in Queensland to the first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and beyond, Apostles of Anarchy juxtaposes newspaper headlines and archival material with the personal experience of these struggles. It asks what it is to fight for the acceptance of difference in a discourse of prejudice and hostility.

New in 2023Featured

2023 Editions

$240.00

Get all fifteen of our new poetry collections released as they are released 2023

Featuring new work by:

April
Nathan Shepherson, Sandra Renew
May
Ally Chua, Alvin Pang & George Szirtes
June
Erin Shiel, Owen Bullock
July
K A Nelson, Martin Dolan
September
Es Foong, Brendan Ryan, Thabani Tshuma
October
Jennifer Allen, Brent Cantwell
November
Jen Webb, Kerry Greer

Not Very Quiet: The anthology

$24.95

Over the last five years, from the #Me Too Movement to same-sex marriage, from devastating bush fires to the global pandemic, the online poetry journal Not Very Quiet has dedicated itself to publishing women’s voices from across the globe. Not Very Quiet: The anthology selects poetry that has given voice to the social conscience of the community, constructions of lesbian and queer, the challenges posed to the social construction of gender, as well as the complexities and possibilities of the human condition.

Edited by Moya Pacey & Sandra Renew

 

It’s the Sugar, Sugar

$19.95

WINNER ACT Notable Book Awards for Poetry 2021

These poems move freely in time from the 1950s to the present day, from the contemporary to memoir, from gender politics to bushfires and floods. They show you jeeps, trucks, girlfriends and cane-cutters, widgies, Singer sewing machines, tattoos and rats and class grudges.
Sandra Renew uses a range of traditional poetry forms to lay bare some of the gaping fault-lines of gender relations especially as they are experienced by LGBTIQ communities.

Acting like a girl

$14.95

WINNER OF THE ACT WRITER’S CENTRE WRITING AND PUBLISHING AWARD 2020

Sandra Renew’s new poems interrogate the choices made in living and performing gender, sexuality and desire—of struggling to be queer in an Australia of Holden utes and rotting mangoes, XXXX stubbies and Bundy rum, boudoir drawers and country roads, toad princes and wanting to be Wesley Hall. It is a book of not wanting to conform, charting the myriad pressures society places on conformity as a mode of survival. It is a brave, and sometimes funny book, filled with wry and deeply felt images and observations