Abbotsleigh piloted the initial Papercuts program with poet Joanne Burns.

The school

Abbotsleigh is a private girls' school with junior and senior campuses located on Sydney's north shore.  As a metropolitan, single-sex private school, it reflected one element of the broad education sector that we wished Papercuts to appeal to.

The project

Red Room provided the school with a booklet of Joanne Burn's poems, and Abbotsleigh also purchased copies of her books for the school library.  She performed and discussed her work, and guided the girls' own poetic beginnings.  Joanne wrote a poem, "sand", for the school at the end of the project.

The poet

Joanne Burns is a Sydney poet who has taught English and creative writing in Australia and the UK.  She has published numerous collections of poems, which incorporate prose and found forms.  Her book Footnotes of a hammock (Five Islands Press, 2004) shared the 2005 Judith Wright Award for a collection of poetry.  She featured in Red Room's The Wordshed and Fingerprints.