Selina Tusitala Marsh is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland where she teaches Postcolonial, New Zealand and Pacific Literature and Creative Writing. Her award-winning poetry collection, Fast Talking PI (Auckland University Press, 2009), featured at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair and has been translated into Ukrainian and Spanish. Her second poetry collection, Dark Sparring was also published by Auckland University Press (2013). She is due to complete her own critical book on first wave Pacific women poets (1974-2008) with the University of Hawai'i Press. In 2016 she was commissioned to write and perform a poem for HRH Queen Elizabeth on behalf of the Commonwealth for Commonwealth Observance Day in Westminster Abbey. She hopes to get a selfie.

Marsh comments: ‘This is a poem reflecting “a day in the life of” … someone who teaches Postcolonial, Pacific, Oceanic, Indigenous and/or any number of combinations of those fields in Literary Studies. It’s a chant and its playful sound and rhythm, along with its cheeky beat, teases the sober discourses into pulsing with some life and real-life passion. Two very different modes of thinking, talking and behaving—one elitist, the other popular culture—clash, and the similarities are made to bleed out in a noun that becomes a very sensual verb: “desiring”.’

Poem source details >

Links
Auckland University Press author page
New Zealand Book Council writer file