Michelle Leber

Michelle Leber lives in Melbourne, close to the beaches of Port Philip Bay. She has been a guest at poetry readings, festivals and community engagements. Her work has appeared in The Best Australian Poems 2009 (Black Inc), The Age, Meanjin, Cordite, ecology bulletins, e-books, high school texts and on trains. She was a recipient of the LongLines poetry residency at Varuna in 2009. Her book The Weeping Grass (APC 2010), creates refuge on the periphery of life – a world where one can acknowledge our limitations through the encounter of the sublime in landscape– by this experience of the natural world we are reminded to celebrate life outside the routine and mundane. She has been likened to David Attenborough by the richness of detail in her poetry. Her latest work, a verse novel about the legendary Yellow Emporer of China, is a vivid poetic response to one of the highpoints in China’s early history. It is both a gripping panorama and an intricate imagined portrait of a sovereign. The Yellow Emperor was published in October 2014 by Five Islands Press.